This Help File is going to show you how to selectively provide access for your users and members to add, edit, or delete content at a site-wide level. You can learn more about using Tendenci's Content-Specific Permissions settings to provide selective access to specific pieces of content on your website in another Help File: Using Tendenci's Content-Specific Permissions.

One of the most valuable features included in Tendenci is the granular level permission settings that enable Tendenci website superusers to control what site users can add, change, delete, and view on your Tendenci website.

In fact, Tendenci has over 1,000 different permissions settings to provide this level of access control.  This help file will explain how to customize your Tendenci website's user, user groups, and member permission settings so that you can provide selective access to content and areas of your website to your users, securely.

Finding Permissions Settings

Tendenci's permissions can be set at a member or user groups level and also at an individual user level.  

Go to Community from your Superuser top bar navigation menu and select Members to edit the permissions and user groups of individual members. Under Community, you also have the option to select Groups to add/edit your groups and their permissions. 

It is easy to create groups under the Options menu. Add your members with specific permissions to that group. You can also add yourself to the group.

The groups you create appear as user groups options under each user or member profile in the Options menu when selecting "edit groups".

Again, on the lower right section of each user or member is an Options menu, and clicking on that will pop up a menu with Permissions as an option, also to edit user groups under "edit groups".

Standard Permission Settings with Django User System

Tendenci's content management software (CMS) comes built-in with standard permission settings in a 3-tier structure: User, Staff, and Superuser. You can adjust the level of access an individual has on their user profile edit view inside section (J) for Superusers: 

Source: https://www.webforefront.com/django/setupdjangousers.html 

Superusers The most powerful user with permissions to create, read, update and delete data in the Django admin, which includes model records and other users.

Staff A user marked as staff can access the Django admin. But permissions to create, read, update and delete data in the Django admin must be given explicitly to a user. By default, a superuser is marked as staff.

Users (active) have limited ability to add, change, or delete any website content. All users are marked as active if they're in good standing. Users marked as inactive aren't able to authenticate themselves, a common state if there's a pending post-registration step (e.g. confirm email) or a user is banned and you don't want to delete his data.

Here is the general list of what your site Users and Members can and cannot do on your website without any permission settings customization: 

Tendenci is built on the Django Framework. Read What You Need to Know to Manage Users in Django Admin 

Using the Permission Settings

When you select Permissions from the User or Group Options menu, you will be directed to a page with all of the available permission settings.  The permission settings are displayed in 3 columns: 

Column 1 is the Content-Type or Module related to the permission settings. 

Column 2 is the content field within the Module or Content-Type.

Column 3 is the actual action (permission) to do something to the content.

In the image above, Column 1 is displaying permission settings for an event that you would add to your event calendar.  Column 2 shows the different fields that you find on the "Add a New Event" Page, and Column 3 are the different actions you and site users could change, add, or delete related to individual Events.  

Here is a screenshot for a new Event to show you how the permission settings relate to using on your Tendenci website: 

In this example for Events, you may want to allow corporate members of your organization to Add Events to your Tendenci website Event Calendar.  You would navigate to your corporate membership group and change the permission settings to allow corporate members to add events.  

You can be as selective as you would like with permission controls, and in our Event example, you would select the events | event | can add an event to allow your corporate members to add new events to the calendar: 

This would allow your members to add new events, but not allow them to delete or change existing events.

Add additional control by allowing members only to add, change, or delete speakers to an existing event or change existing events without being able to add new events or delete an event: 

Using Tendenci's permission settings, you can securely provide customized access for your site users based on groups, membership types, and individual users.  

Permission Settings Defined

Here are the most commonly used Tendenci permission settings with definitions.  There are a number of permission settings that you will most likely never use and we have left those out.  Also, we are constantly updating and adding new features to Tendenci and sometimes those include new permission settings that you may not see here.  We are happy to help answer specific questions if you email our support team: https://www.tendenci.com/tickets/. 

Download the full list of Permissions as a PDF.

Did this answer your question? If not, please contact our support team for more information.