Users

Users – can't live with em, can't live without em.

Drupal provides a lot of functionality to manage users. Users can register on your site to become authenticated users, and Drupal can handle the whole process automatically, including sending verification emails to users to validate their email address.

You can decide which permissions are granted to different users (can they post comments, are they allowed to access all pages on the site, etc). You can also create different types of user (roles), and grant different permissions to each.

You can also manage individual user accounts, for example blocking abusive users.

Why have users?

To take the example of cookiewiki.com, if it was a simple website which just displayed a searchable set of online recipes, then it probably wouldn't need to bother allowing users to set up acounts and log in.

However, there are two very good reasons why Cookie Wiki needs user accounts.

The first is that Cookie Wiki users are allowed to post their own recipes, and comment on other peoples' recipes. Authenticated user accounts give users a reasonably secure identity on the site. If a particular user adopts the name “master_chef”, then anything they post will be identified as their posting. If they post lots of useful items, then other users will know that anything posted by “master_chef” is worth reading.

Without the protection of user accounts, anybody could impersonate “master_chef”, posting stupid or malicious comments. This detracts from the site, it isn't fair on active contributors and it isn't helpful to genuine users. However, since "master

A second reason is that Cookie Wiki is managed online. The owner is happy to allow users to contribute recipes and comments, but doesn't want anyone else editing other parts of the site, eg the Terms and conditions page (would you?). On larger sites, there might be several users with special permissions, but not full admin rights. For example, Cookie Wiki might appoint some trusted users to browse new recipes and delete any which are spoofs.