Roles and permissions in the CMS

The governance for our web presence indicates a strategic and holistic approach to our content. Before information is posted on the site, it will be necessary to identify - from a strategic point of view - why new content is needed. If new content should be added, then care must be taken to ensure that it fits with existing content from a style and tone & voice perspective and a location must be identified in the site map. Depending on why the new content is needed, we may need to add new writers or editors, and they will need to complete training on writing for the web and how to use the CMS. It will be important to ensure that all these support pieces are in place before content is added.

Aside from system administrator roles, there are three common roles assigned to people who maintain content. They are Writers, Editors and Publishers.

Workflow

Writer

The writer's role is a moderated one, meaning they cannot publish content. Pages pass from writer to publisher as many times as necessary while they work to finalize the text. Once the content is ready, the publisher moves it to the "published" state. It is now visible to the public.

When you are ready to submit your work to your publisher, change the status to "Publisher review" and select your publisher from the list. Your publisher is likely in your department.

Editor

An editor is not moderated. They can create/edit their own pages and then publish them without requiring intervention from another person/role.

Publisher

A publisher is not moderated. They can create/edit their own pages and publish them without requiring intervention from another person/role. They are responsible for moderating content edited by a Writer.

In addition to one of the roles discussed above, every person who maintains content is assigned an additional role that indicates what department or group they are with. If you are assigned the role of Editor and the role of Leadership Staff, for example, then you can create/edit your own pages within the Leadership section of the site. That makes sense, right?

But, it's slightly more complicated than that. Some content that appears to belong to Leadership because it is visible in the section of the site under the school of "Leadership"... is actually under the purview of Marketing. We'll need to rely on some standard operating procedures to make sure we manage things properly in this kind of case.

We've prepared some documentation about workflow and content ownership to help explain and illustrate who owns what.

IT-Services Knowledge Base

Roles and permissions in the CMS

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