Roles and permissions
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Template:Roles and capabilities
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Roles are groups of permissions. Users are assigned roles in specific contexts. The combination of roles and context define a specific user's capability on any page. The most common example are the roles of student and teacher in the context of a course.
- Note: In many instances "capabilities" and "permissions" are used interchangeably, but they are actually a pair. Capabilities are editable variables, whereas permissions are the value give to a capability.
Definitions
- Role
- An identifier of the user's status within each Context. The status depends upon permissions given for one or more capabilities in any given context. A role can often change within different contexts.
- For example Teacher and Student are standard user roles. These roles probably have different capabilities in some contexts but may share permissions in the other.
- When Moodle is first installed, a number of Standard roles are created automatically.
- Capability
- A description of a particular Moodle feature. A list of many capabilities can be seen in the capability category index page.
- For example moodle/blog:create(writing blog entries) or "Backup course" are two capabilities. Note the "mod/blog:create" notation is a common to identify a capability.
- Permission
- A setting for a capability. Can be any one of four: not set/inherit, allow, prevent or prohibit.
- Context
- A "space" in Moodle.
- For example: a course, activity module or block can each be a context.
- Some contexts can contain multiple contexts in their space, For example, a course can contain a lesson, assignment, forum and quiz modules, plus blocks.
- A "course" in Moodle.
