User Management in Pimcore – flexible and easy to handle
As part of our guest blog series, we are happy to introduce Jan Peifer - a Project Manager at anyMOTION Graphics located in Düsseldorf, Germany. AnyMOTION is a full-service internet agency that provides all solutions and aspects of digital marketing. They offer professional services from conception and implementation to the point of moving into production including social media and online marketing.
Pimcore is offering an easy way to work with Open-Source-Software. The web based application uses PHP as the script language and MySQL as the database system. The basis for Pimcore consists of the Zend Framework, the Symfony Project and leading PHP components such as Composer.
With Pimcore you get the opportunity to create and administrate several users easily. In addition to the administrator, whose role is obligatory and receives all rights, you can create more accounts and delegate rights to chosen roles. Those rights can range from full access (even complete administrative rights) to no rights at all, based on the configuration of the permissions. Roles can be allocated to users, which then gain the rights of the role. To have an organized overview, folders can be created for users and roles.
The benefit of user management in Pimcore consists of having a clear structured role model. With that, Pimcore offers a flexible management system which is easy to use. In the following paragraph, you can get a detailed insight.
User Management – Further into Detail
The Pimcore system has two essential categories of rights: on the one hand the „System Permissions“, and on the other hand the „Element Permissions“. For each role and user, those two categories can be set up individually. The „System Permissions“ can handle the basic authorizations of the Pimcore system. These permissions are for example administrative rights, rights for notifications and cover rights for e-mail, assets, and objects, relevant for the access to certain documents or modules. The „Element Permissions“ contain all rights and define all steps related to the workspace of the user („documents“, „assets“ and „objects“). Every possible action is configurable, from only viewing to editing & publishing. You can also allocate these actions to a role or user. It’s important to know that certain rights require having other rights first. This means that a user, for example, is only able to edit a page, if his user role also has the right to view the page.
The „Special Settings“ have to be considered separately. They make it possible to see a structured overview of the currently used „Element Permissions“, with which you can for example limit or expand rights on languages if you want an editor to work only on a specific language version. Even external plugins are included in the rights management system. It’s possible to add special system permissions to control the use of your plugins. You see there are many possibilities to structure the permissions for users of the Pimcore platform.
User Management – Individual Access at Ease
By using classes in Pimcore you can define meta data or custom layouts, which have an influence on the backend. With the class editor, you also have access to the layout editor, where you can create individual views of layouts for specific users or groups. There is also the option to fade in or fade out tools for your specific users, offering them a clearer overview of the tools they really need to work with. In addition to these tools, Pimcore offers a direct database access, where you can use DML and DDL tools. With the edit mode in the PHP-code, objects and fields can be integrated.
The user management of Pimcore is easy to handle and makes it possible to administrate rights as needed. It is an efficient tool which grants control and overview to all pages. Once you have an overview of the relevant operations of the role model, you have a broad range of possibilities to structure your user management system exactly according to your needs.
