Why only teachers can create book pages

2 min read

As I originally envisioned the site, I envisioned a site where both students and teachers had the rights to create book pages, edit book pages, and maintain books.

And this site I envisioned was beautiful. Teachers could create course content and make it viewable -- but not editable -- by their students by posting it under the Teacher term. Students could create gorgeous group projects, and use the built in navigational tools of books to simplify the organization of this project.

But, this vision crashed headlong into reality.

The way Drupal works, all members of the site have the ability to add child pages to all existing projects using books. Using taxonomy access, you can restrict access to nodes posted in a specific term. You can't, however, stop users from posting child pages into any section of existing books. So, students would always have the ability to post new pages into books generated by their instructor, or into books generated by other groups.

So, I opted to use pages as a way around this. While pages don't generate the hierarchical links on the fly, they can be effectively grouped using taxonomy access. For more info on this topic, see the group collaboration page.