Everything you're allowed to do in the admin panel is controlled by your role. This article explains the concept in plain language — the practical guide to managing roles is in the Administration section, for administrators.
The short version
- An administrator assigns you a role (for example, "Editor", or a custom role like "Articles Managers").
- Each role is made up of individual permissions — small, specific abilities like "view articles" or "delete categories".
- You only see sidebar links, buttons, and pages that match a permission you actually have. There's nothing wrong if your screen looks different from a coworker's — you simply have a different role.
Typical permission pattern
Most content permissions come in a group of four, per content type (categories, subcategories, articles, FAQs):
| Permission | What it lets you do |
|---|---|
| view | See the list and open items to read them |
| create | Add new items |
| update | Edit existing items |
| delete | Remove items |
So someone with only "articles.view" and "articles.update" can edit existing articles but won't see a "New Article" button and can't delete anything.
A few permissions aren't split this way and instead cover a whole area at once: Manage Users, Manage Roles, Manage Settings, and, for the activity log and session tools, View Monitoring and Manage Monitoring.
You need at least one permission, from any role, before the admin panel will let you in at all. If you can log in to the public site but get sent back to the homepage when trying to reach the admin panel, you don't currently have any permissions assigned — ask your administrator to check your role.
If a specific page or button you expected to see is missing, see "Why Can't I See a Menu Item or Button?" in Troubleshooting.