Administration within Drupal tends to be a monolithic structure that users must learn to navigate and utilize if they ever want to take full advantage of the platform. In addition to this, the permission architecture of Drupal can be a bit arbitrary as to who gets access to what, often failing to have an appropriate level of granularity. In this session we will investigate how to deploy custom administrative environments for your users, create more granular access systems, and export these tools for long term reuse and re-deployment.

This session will focus primarily on the context_admin module and its relationship with ctools/page_manager and the default tools it provides. A working knowledge of features module will help in understanding this session, as well as experience with panels, views and ctools exportables.

Intended audience

Developers, Feature creators, CTools/Panels enthusiasts, Advanced site builders

Questions answered by this session:

• What is the Contextual Administration module and why does it exist?
• How does this let us build a more granular access control system?
• What does this have to do with Features?
• What does this have to do with Panels?
• How do I extend Contextual Administration for my own administrative purposes.