Problem isolating assets

Question

I have a 100 articles, and with for each article 1 author. Authors can only edit their own entries.

Every article as an Asset directory called "Photo Album". This works fine. Beautiful, even.

The problem is that, when I enable

- View source
--- Upload files

.... every author from the group has access to the entire Assets, Photo Album folder, globally, so to all folders. I need to enable the "View source" part because they also need to be able to add a Caption and Copyright notice for each picture.

Under Sections, one could finegrain this

- Edit other authors’ entries
- Edit other authors’ drafts

But not with Assets.

Does anyone have a fix for this?

I don't really expect my editors to start sabotaging each others's articles but it's not very elegant, and mistakes can be made, esp with 100 directories in there.

Thanks

Answer 1

I didn't know this yet, but it seem like you can't do Quick Editing asset meta fields from the Edit Entry view for asset sources you don't have editing permission.

In your situation this get's into the way of setting things up like Jamie Wade suggested. But it's actually quite logical: no editing permissions means no permissions anywhere. So what you actually need is to have this setting to be split into:

• "Edit assets from Assets view"
• "Edit assets form Edit Entry view"

You could try to convince P&T of the usefulness of such a permission setting by adding a feature request.

In the meantime you could use a workaround and simply hide the assets panel completely for all users but admins for example. You would give your users the permission to edit all assets from all entries, but they won't find a way to do so as they can't access the UI for it.

To do this you can make use of the new modifyCpNav hook in a small businesslogic plugin.

public function modifyCpNav(&$nav)
{
    if (!craft()->userSession->isAdmin())
    {
        unset($nav['assets']);
    }
}

Answer 2

As far as I know you can't restrict users to certain folders in the Assets section of Craft, you can only set their permissions for the whole Asset Source.

The only workaround I can think of for you would be to actually remove Authors permissions on the Assets section of Craft completely.

That way the only way they can make Asset updates is when they are editing an entry, and with the permissions structure you have they can only edit entries they have made themselves anyway.

As they don't have access to other people's entries, they can't edit the assets on them.

It may not be the most elegant approach but it would give you the functionality you are looking for. I'm sure others might have a better way of handling it though. Hope that helps a little.