Creating an Editor Role and Reusing the Admin Menu and Overlay in Drupal 7

Question

I, like so many other Drupal users, wish to add an Editor role into my website. I have already done this. I want the Editor to be responsible for editing and publishing certain content, as well as create certain types of content.

I use the Admin Menu module so I get that very nice flyout-menu administrator toolbar. Well, I want the editor to be able to use the same menu, only with certain items missing. Not only do I want them to use the same menu, but I want it to appear in the same bar. I also want the editor to be able to use the overlay as well, just as it appears for the administrator.

How do I do this?

Cheers.

Answer 1

Assuming you have the Administration menu module enabled, under People > Permissions check the following boxes:

Administration menu

• Access administration menu

Node

• Bypass content access control (note though, this gives the user permission to delete all content; if you don't desire this then you can micro-manage the permission on the individual content types, it's more box checking but also more secure)

System

• Use the administration pages and help
• View the administrative theme

Those are the core permissions that you need to have in order for a role to view the administration menu as well as menu items pertinent to managing site content.

Now, in order to make sure that the role is more or less secure, I would always uncheck every box whose label begins with "Administer...", as these permissions would be for administration roles.

Answer 2

See the Administration Menu Source to achieve this.

Use a different menu as the Administration Menu. Configurable per role.

Answer 3

See the Menu per Role module to achieve this. Here is a quote about it (from the module's project page):

... allows you to restrict access to menu items ^(*) based on user roles. It depends on the Drupal core menu.module—just activate both modules and edit a menu item as usual. There will be a new fieldset that allows you to restrict access by role. The fieldset also appears in the node edit form.

^(*): We wrote "menu items", not "nodes" ... This module does not prevent users from accessing the destination nodes. It only changes the visibility of the menu items.