Permissions in In-Portal are a very powerful tool that allows the administrator to allow or disallow groups of users to execute certain functions. There are two main types of permission - user permissions and item permissions.

User Permissions
User permissions govern a limited number of actions a user or group of users can take on the Front-End or in the Admin Console. These actions are:

• logging in to the Front end
  
• logging in to the Admin Console
  
• changing of various debug options - these are options that you can turn on. They are mostly used for development purposes in case you want to see in more detail what is happening behind the scenes
  

The actions specified through the user permissions apply to the whole In-Portal system. You can find the user permissions when you login to the Admin Console of your In-Portal site and go to 'Community' sectionin the left menu. From there, you can go to either 'Users' or 'Groups' depending on whether you want to change permissions for a single user or a whole group of users. Say you want to see/change a group's permissions - click on 'Group', then check the name of the group, click 'Edit', and go to the 'Permissions' tab. You will be presented with two choices - 'Permission Type Admin' and 'Permission Type Front End'. Under 'Permission Type Admin' you will be able to allow/disallow a user to login to the admin console and to turn on/off debug options. Under 'Permission Type Front End' you will be able to allow/disallow a user to login to the front end. To make changes simply check/uncheck the 'Access' box next to a function in order to enable/disable access. You'll need to click 'Save' two times once you are done modifying permissions. After that the system will take you back to the list of Users or Groups where you came from in the begining.

Item Permissions
Item permissions are the permissions that you use to control access to the various modules of In-Portal and their functions. Think of items as the Categories (In-portal Platform), Links (In-link), Articles (In-newz), Products (In-commerce) and Topics/Posts (In-bulletin) of your In-Portal website. You can only set the permissions for a category, but doing this automatically sets the permissions for all items in that category as well. Through item permissions, you can control the access of groups to a module's functions:

• for In-Portal in general: addition/deletion/modification/view of categories
  
• for In-Commerce: review/rating of products
  
• for In-Link: addition/deletion/modification/view/review/rating of links
  
• for In-Bulletin: addition/deletion/modification/view/review/rating of forum topics
  
• for In-News: addition/deletion/modification/view/review/rating of news items
  

To edit the permissions for an item, go to your Admin Console -> Structure and Data -> Catalog and find the category where the items is. Click on the checkbox next to the category, then 'Edit' and then go to the 'Permissions' tab. Choose the group whose permissions on the item you want to see/change. Notice that unlike user permissions, here you can only work with groups, but not individual users. Now choose the module whose set of permissions you'd like to edit. Note that the module choice is there to just ease the navigation of the different permissions, nothing formally prevents you from choosing 'In-Link' and setting a 'View Link' permission on a category of news topics. Having chosen the module permissions set, you can now edit the permissions. There are two options - 'Access' and 'Inherited'. Use the 'Access' option to allow/disallow certain functions in the same way you did for user permissions. Use the 'Inherited' option to set a permission to the same value as that of the same permission in the parent category.

For example: If you are editing the permissions for 'Home -> Directory -> SubDir', and you want to set everything to be the same as in 'Home -> Directory', you can simply set the permissions to 'Inherited'.

By default, all permissions for all newly created categories are set to 'Inherited'. So, if you add a new category in 'Home -> Directory', the system will automatically set permissions to 'Inherited' and the new category will have the same permissions as 'Home -> Directory', its parent. Later you can adjust the permissions as necessary if needed.

Make sure you save completely in order for the new permissions to take effect. This means that you have to save each step that you made to make your corrections. So, after you are done changing the permissions and hit the 'Save' button, you will be presented with a new screen, where you also have to save, since one of the steps you took to change your permissions was on this screen. You must save all screens on which the 'Save' button appears. After you have saved completely, you will see an 'Updating Categories' bar being filled, and then you will be taken to the place in 'Catalog' where you started.

Using inheritance makes managing permissions easy and efficient, because when your categories are grouped appropriately you will be able to set their permissinos by specifying the permissions for a select number of categories from which everyone else inherits.