Design a better model for managing permissions

Created on 30 October 2017, over 7 years ago
Updated 28 May 2025, 9 days ago

The main Permissions form (/admin/people/permissions) is currently an ever growing sea of checkboxes. Right out of the box it's already a hard list to scan and that only gets worse when adding 10, 30 or more contrib modules. To the point where simply loading the page becomes a serious performance issue.

The current model of a grid lists all available permissions in rows and all roles in columns needs a thorough rethink. Lets figure out a plan for how to do that in here.

We have made some progress recently: see Comment #13. We should pause for now, until those changes are released and people get used to them.

Next steps

  1. Talk with site builders: how, when do permissions come into play?
  2. Map out the problem space
  3. How could we group, chunk, divide this set into meaningful parts?
  4. Sketch possible solutions
  5. Review. Which ideas to prototype?
  6. Etc…

Related issues

For reference, here are some open issues related to managing permissions.

These issues aim to improve how we manage permissions:

These issues will add new permissions:

This issue will add new roles to the Standard profile:

📌 Task
Status

Active

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

menu system

Created by

🇳🇱Netherlands yoroy

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It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.

  • 🇳🇿New Zealand quietone

    The Ideas project is being deprecated. This issue is moved to the Drupal project. Check that the selected component is correct. Also, add the relevant tags, especially any 'needs manager review' tags.

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