Chapter 5. Security and Permissions

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Entity Definitions
2.1. Resources
2.2. Permissions
2.3. Roles
2.4. Users
2.5. Organizations and Locations
2.6. Communities
2.7. User Groups
3. Administration
3.1. Creating a Role
3.2. Assigning Company Permissions to a Role
3.3. Assigning Community Permissions to a Role
3.4. Assigning Roles
3.5. Assigning Individual Portlet Permissions
3.6. Assigning Default Permissions
3.7. Assigning Individual Permissions
3.8. Special Case: Assigning Individual Permissions to Locations
3.9. Delegating Permissions

This chapter will provide a reference for administering permissions for existing portlets and objects within Liferay Portal 4. Fine grain permissioning is one of the main new features of this release. The entire groups permissioning mechanism in Liferay has been reworked to allow for resource level permissions for users, communities, organizations, locations, and user groups. Please refer to the developers guide for implementation specifics.

1. Introduction

Liferay Portal introduces a new security model that incorporates a fine-grained permissioning system to give administrators full control over access and privileges to portlets and objects within the portal. In all prior releases, permissioning was handled on a per portlet basis and was therefore limited in use and difficult to maintain. In this new release, the vast majority of permissioning logic has been extracted into its own framework so that the integration of permissioning into new portlets is minimal. In addition, the permissioning logic has been greatly enhanced so that administrators can finely tune security within the portal. This document begins by giving a high-level overview of all the entities involved in the security model. Some entities have always existed in the portal and should be familiar to administrators, but others are brand new and therefore require definition and explanation. Next, a discussion of all of the ways to assign permissions to users is given in a use case format.