Joomla Blog

ACL (Access Control List):

Joomla's ACL offers a way of securing content and "controlling access" to certain objects and functions within a website. There are two aspects to the ACL in Joomla, who can view things and who can do things in regards to content and various actions available to users.

Joomla's Access Control List determines things like who can see certain articles and other media published on a website as well as who can add and edit content and media. It also determines who can access the Administrator and what they can see and do while they are logged in.

The access control list (ACL) feature in Joomla 1.5 is quite basic and this was seen by many as its greatest weakness. Version 1.6 changed everything, but for some the opposite became true - the ACL was now too complicated. If this is the case for you, learn how to gain control again with this review of an extension called ACL Manager.

The Joomla Access Control List feature allows site owners to place users into groups and those groups can be given permissions as to who can create and manage content. This post explains the different actions that groups can perform.

The Joomla ACL provides two main functions; it can restrict who can view certain content and who can take action on content items, for example create an article. This post explains the basic steps for the first part - how to restrict which users can view content.

The Joomla ACL is incredibly flexible but there are a couple of areas where in some circumstances, it might not provide the features you need. For example the frontend registration option assigns users to a group that you specify. But what if you need to give your user the choice as to which group they can join? This post answers introduces you to an extensions that solves this dilemma.

Joomla version 1.6 was released in January last year and it heralded a vast array of improvements. The biggest change was to the access control list which is the feature that implements permissions that determine who can view certain content items and who can manage content. It is a powerful and flexible system, but it is not intuitive and requires good planning. This is the first of several articles discussing how to use the Joomla ACL.

Users:

the people who view and optionally manage a website. There are several types of Joomla users and various permissions can be assigned to groups of users.