Working with DotNetNuke Security Roles

By Lee Sykes

September 2005

One of the most complex and important elements you need to understand when working with DotNetNuke is setting up the security roles.

This video tutorial covers:

An explanation of security roles
An analysis of what security roles we require for a music website & how they will be used
How security roles work with users
How to add security roles to your DotNetNuke portal
Auto assignment of roles, the public roles
Subscribing to a role (ie. a newsletter subscription) as a registered user

Time length: 6min 48secs

Planning the Security Roles

DotNetNuke uses role based security. This allows you to give access to certain areas of your website, dependant on which security role a user belongs to. Every website has different requirements, so it is wise to plan your requirements before you start adding any content to your website.

As an example, we are going to work through the security roles we require for a music website. Our website consists of several access areas, which will require different security roles to access them.

Website Access Area	Description	Security Role Name
Visitor	Access to all areas of website, except the mp3 downloads area and posting messages in the forum.	Un-authenticated user
Home Page Text	This is to be managed and updated by a member of staff.	Home Page Administrator
MP3s Downloads & Forum	Access to MP3s. Only available to website members. To post a message in the forum, you have to be a member of the website.	Registered Users
Forum Admin	The forum posts need to be moderated by a member of staff.	Forum Administrator
Newsletter	We want to allow our users to register with our website to receive a newsletter.	Newsletter Subscriber
Website Administrator	High Security. To manage the entire website content and portal, eg. Skins, adding new modules etc.	Administrators

DotNetNuke gives us very flexible options for configuring the areas of our website:

Each user of your website is assigned to a security role
A user can be assigned to several security roles at the same time
A security role can have several users assigned to it

Note: The following roles come installed as default with your DotNetNuke portal

Administrators
Registered Users
Subscribers

Now that we have decided what security roles we require, we need to add them to our website, this alone will not secure the website however.

We need to:

Create the security roles
Assign the security roles to the users of our website
Assign the security roles to the pages and modules, setting which roles have access to a page or module