Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

Hotaru CMS uses both roles and permissions to help site admins micro-manage their users.

The default usergroups are Admin, Supermod, Moderator, Member, Undermod, Pending, Suspended, Banned, Killspammed and Unregistered. Plugins assign permissions to each usergroup, and you can edit them for individual users or entire usergroups.

That alone is pretty awesome, but the next version of Hotaru, coupled with User Manager, will add another level of user domination thanks to my latest experiment, custom usergroups.

The custom usergroups feature is nothing special to look at, but under the hood, it's a mighty powerful tool. To use it, you would go to the Edit Default Permissions page of User Manager and click "Manage custom usergroups...". A drop-down box will give you two choices: "Create new usergroup" or "Remove custom usergroup", as shown below:



When you create a new usergroup, you can choose a default user role to base the initial permissions on. When you want to delete a custom usergroup, you can choose which role to assign to users in the group you're deleting. Any users assigned to an existing group automatically adopt the permissions of the group they are joining.

Custom usergroups open up all manner of possibilities. You could create a team of mini-moderators, a watchlist of problem users, a group of paying members with special privileges, etc, etc...

Of course, to get the most out of custom user groups, I suggest you pick up a PHP for Absolute Beginners book, read the Hotaru documentation, follow the plugin case studies and learn how to add permissions to your own custom plugins. Be the master of your own website!