Drupal User Management

User management is an important aspect of a content management system. Thankfully, drupal has really good user management tools built in. Here are some of the cool things drupal can do for you out of the box.

Manage Users

Managing users with Drupal is fairly straightforward. If you navigate to the user overview page, you will see a list of all your users. It shows whether the user is active or not, how long they have been a member, and when they last logged in. It also gives you tools to create, edit, delete and block users.

This page also provides some tools to search and update multiple users at once. This may not be useful for small sites, but when you have a site with tens of thousands of users, you will learn to love these features.

You can find the user overview page at yoursite.com/admin/people

Create Users

Creating new users requires no special configurations and is pretty easy to do. In fact, after you have your drupal site up and running, you can create users with basic fields like username, password, and email address. These are fairly standard across the web and allow users to register and log in to your site.

You can also set up how you want users to be created. You can specify that only administrators can create new users or allow users to register themselves. You can even force new users to be approved by an admin before their account is activated.

Want to add more fields? Not a problem, since users are fieldable entities you can add any number of fields such as name, birth date, gender, etc. These can help you customize your user experience and let you do cool things. Things like sending your users an email on their birthday or customizing your site based on if they are male or female.

To create a new user go to: yoursite.com/admin/people/create

Drupal Roles

Drupal also lets you create and assign different roles for your users. Roles are extremely powerful and can allow you to give groups of users unique permissions or only show specific content. For example, you can show premium content to only logged-in users, or only allow blog editors to add new blog posts.

By default, drupal has two roles; anonymous user and authenticated user. You will probably want to create a few new roles for your site. To do this, simply go to: yoursite.com/admin/people/permissions/roles.

User Permissions

The permissions page is where all of your website’s permissions are managed. Here you will see a column for each of your site’s roles. Every module that you enable usually has a set of unique permissions and will show up on this page.

Configuring permissions is easy, simply check the permissions you want to grant your users, and voila. But with great power comes great responsibility. Be careful when granting permissions, especially with eCommerce sites as this can have severe security risks.

The permissions page is available at yoursite.com/admin/people/permissions

Advanced User Management For Drupal Developers

Are you a drupal developer? Looking for some more advanced user management tips? Keep an eye out for my next blog post.