README.txt in Content Access 5

Content Access Module
-----------------------
by Wolfgang Ziegler, nuppla@zites.net

Yet another node access module.
So this module allows you to manage permissions for content types by role and author. It allows
you to specifiy custom view, edit and delete permissions for each content type. Optionally you
can also enable per node access settings, so you can customize the access for each node.

In particular
  * it comes with sensible defaults, so you need not configure anything and everything stays working
  * it is as flexible as you want. It can work with per content type settings, per node settings
    as well as with flexible Access Control Lists.
  * it trys to reuse existing functionality instead of reimplementing it. So one can install the ACL
    module and set per user access control settings per node.
    Furthermore the module provides conditions and actions for the workflow-ng module, which allows one
    to configure even rule-based access permissions.
  * it optimizes the written node grants, so that only really necessary grants are written.
  * it takes access control as important as it is. E.g. the module has a bunch of simpletests to ensure
    everything is working right.

So the module is simple to use, but can be configured to provide really fine-grained permissions!


Installation
------------
 * Copy the content access module's directory to your modules directory and activate the module.
 * Optionally download and install the ACL module too.
 * Edit a content type at admin/content/types. There will be a new tab "Access Control".


ACL Module
-----------
You can find the ACL module at http://drupal.org/project/acl. Note that you'll need to install at
least version 1.4 of the module. To make use of Access Control Lists you'll need to enable per node
access control settings for a content type. At the access control tab of such a node you'll be
able to grant single users view, edit or delete permission for this node.

 

Enabling this module on big sites
----------------------------------
Drupal 5.1 uses a lot of memory, as soon as you enable this, or any other node access module on a
site with a lot of existing nodes, which means thousands of nodes. This is problem of drupal itself,
and is fixed in the latest development snapshot of 5.x (http://drupal.org/node/108752).
So if you are experiencing memory issues or you are planning to enable this on such a big site update
to the latest development snapshot of drupal 5.x before. 
You can find it here: http://drupal.org/project/drupal

If drupal 5.2 is already released at the time you read that, it will also contain the fix.



Running multiple node access modules on a site (Advanced!)
-----------------------------------------------------------
A drupal node access module can only grant access to content nodes, but not deny it. So if you
are using multiple node access modules, access will be granted to a node as soon as one of the
module grants access to it.
However you can influence the behaviour by changing the priority of the content access module as
drupal applies *only* the grants with the highest priority. So if content access has the highest
priority *alone*, only its grants will be applied. 

By default node access modules use priority 0.