Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 3 ■ Creating and Managing Users
The hardest part about creating user roles is deciding what roles you’ll need for your site. In general
terms, it is easier to administer a site that has fewer roles than one that has lots of roles, as you must set the
permissions for each individual role. However, fewer roles means less flexibility, so it is a balancing act, and
often one that you have to adjust over time as you become more familiar with the types of users on your site.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a formula you can use to determine how many roles you’ll need, but fortunately
there isn’t a right or wrong answer as to how many you will need. For our example, we’ll create two generalpurpose
roles:
A role for users who are part of our organization and who will have responsibility
for authoring, publishing, and managing content and menus on our site.
A role for site visitors who are provided access to “non-public” content that is
intended only for authenticated users (visitors who have been assigned a user ID
and password). These users can view content and add comments to content, but
cannot author, edit, or delete content.
To create a new user role, assuming you are logged in with the administrator account, click the Manage
link in the menu at the top of the page and then the People link in the submenu. On the People page, click
the Roles tab to view the page where you view, create, edit, and delete roles. On this page there is a blank
text box titled “Role name” , which is where you will enter the name of your new role. For demonstration
purposes, enter “company user” as the name of the new role (see Figure 3-2).
Figure 3-2. Working with roles in the People page
Click the Save button. This results in the creation of the company user role, as shown in the list of
defined user roles in Figure 3-3.
Figure 3-3. The list of defined roles
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