Great idea. I wonder about this feature also. Granularity in security would be of great help...

I understand that MT is not heading in the "corporate" direction, but like you said, extra administrative features are very much desirable to individual end-users too.  I think the ability to restrict post permission by category makes MT more user-friendly.  It would just be one less thing for an author to worry about.  He or she would be able to just type up an entry and submit it without selecting a category.

Would it be possible to further restrict an author's permission by specifying what categories the author can post in?  Right now, an author that's given "Post" permission can post in any category, correct?

For example, let's say I have three categories, "Site News," "Business," and "Politics."  I would like to be able to add an author that can only post new entries in "Business" and "Politics" and not "Site News."

Thanks for your wonderful product.

This is an often requested feature. I know I've requested it before and I'm  pretty sure I wasn't the first.

I think at the time Ben said he and Mena were considering a bunch of "administrative" features for the next release. As it turns out (I'm guessing here) a lot of the recent development effort went into adding MySQL support, which I think was a smart move on their part.

I can only speculate about the availiblity of administrative features in future releases, but I can offer you this, a comment Mena made on Blogroots:

http://www.blogroots.com/comments.blog/56#324

She mentions that Movable Type won't be targeted for the corporate sector. To me this suggests that there won't be a lot of development effort put into administrative features. Obviously, this is not a quote of what she said, just my personal opinion; an inference based on things I've read.

Frankly, I don't think the needs of the corporate sector are that much different from those of the average blog author. Right now, the only difference in need that I can think of is that the corporate customers (IT managers) would need an easy way to tie MT into their own authentication systems. More granualrity for permissions, I think, is needed by everyone, not just corporate customers. (Hmmm, perhaps I've just contradicted myself?)

Sheesh..I feel like the Movable Type equivalent of one of those Apple rumor mongers. I hope I haven't started any rumors. This was just specualtion.

My hope is that this post (and my question from yesterday, looking for the MT "features in development" page), will lead to the publication of a product roadmap. I have some other hopes too, but I'll leave it at that.

Cheers!

Anybody else interested or can take a crack at this?

I'm new at this......but I'm setting up a blog for an association with multiple content providers. I want each member to be able to post to a specific category, and then have a home page that aggregates the content of all the members. Without publish permissions by category, I would need to set up a different blog per member and work out the aggegation myself.

I agree with earlier posts that this is not a feature that is usefull only in a corporate environemnt; but isefull to every "mult user/content provider" blog. One needs to be able to set up a framework that memebrs can work within otherwise the content becomes a mess.

Corperate support as I see it is the integration of identity and authentication with other corperate systems. I do beleive this is usefull out of a corperate environment.

-Simon

Take a look at the security in Geeklog. That's just about as good as it gets.

Looking back over the last year's worth of posts in this forum I can see this is an oft requested fature. I'm definitely interested in hearing what has since been developed along these lines for use in a site I'm working on.