Perch 2.3 Preview: Role Actions

Last year, Perch 2 launched with a greatly enhanced users and roles system. Instead of the two fixed Admin and Editor roles with predefined privileges that Perch 1 used, we now have a flexible system of roles and privileges that can be created, combined and customised to your site’s needs.

Roles can be created and given the permission to only access the features and regions that you want that role to access. This flexibility is clearly useful, but as always, with added flexibility comes the potential that you’ll need to work a bit harder to configure things. It’s a difficult balance, and one we try to strike carefully in Perch.

One of the pain points with this system is if you need to make a change after your site is already up and running. Imagine that a client comes back to you to add a Vacancies section to their site, and they want a user from their internal HR department to manage the listings, but not be able to access anything else. That’s completely possible to do in Perch as it stands today but, as regions are editable by everyone until you lock them down, you’re going to have to go through the entire site and restrict the permissions to prevent the HR user from being able to make edits.

That’s a pretty thankless task, and just the sort of thing software should be good at. This is why we’ve created Role Actions in Perch 2.3. Role Actions run through all your existing regions and pages to set permissions for the selected role. They can:

• Grant or revoke permission for the role to edit all regions, or
• Grant or revoke permission for the role to be able to create subpages of all pages

This is a one-time action – you click go and it runs through the regions and pages and modifies the permissions en masse, as if you’d gone through and changed all those options by hand. You can run it multiple items, of course, but it’s not a setting – it’s an action to change lots of settings all at once.

In the case of our new HR role, we could now use Role Actions to revoke their permission to edit all regions and create all subpages. Once that’s done, we just need to go into the new Vacancies section and reassign the correct permissions to the things that role should be able to access.

A small feature that is hopefully going to be a big time-saver for those managing larger sites.