Hi all, so I am writing a big CMS-esque app to allow users to manage web content through web applications, I've got a pretty good db-driven user permission system going, but am having trouble coming up with a good way to handle content groups and pages, I've got a couple options and not sure which one to take. Furthermore, I am not sure how to handle static page updates that have no 'widgets' in them.

My current set-up for permissions is this:

Objects:

User, UserGroup, UserUserGroup, UserGroupType

Standard many to many relationship User -> UserUserGroup <- UserGroup each Usergroup has a UserGroupType, which could be anything from Title, Department, to PermissionGroup. PermissionGroup manages the permissions. Right now on a per page basis I check permissions based on their PermissionsGroups. So for a page which has CMS features for a news widget, I check for permission groups of "Site Admin" and "News Admin".

Now the issue I am coming to is, the site has many different departments involved. No problem I think, I can just have a EntityContentGroup so any widget app can be used for any departments. So my HR department, each of their news items would be in the EntityContentGroup with the news item ID, and content group of "HR" or "HR News".

But maybe this isn't the most efficient way to go about it? I don't want to put the content group simply as a NewsItemType because some news items could apply to multiple areas, so I want to be able to assign them to as many areas as I want. Likewise, all of my widget apps have this, so that's why I decided to choose EntityContentGroup and not just NewsItemContentGroup.

I was also thinking well instead of doing a contentGroup do a Page object that says which page some entity should be on. It seems almost like the same thing, but would I want to use Page for something else? I was thinking Page would be used for static pages with no widgets, a simple Rich Text Editor can edit the content of that page and I save that item to a page?? And then instead of doing a page level check for UserGroup permissions, would it be better to associate a usergroup to a contentgroup, and then just depending on what contentGroup content on the page is displayed, determine the permissions through that relationship? Is that better? I am not sure at this point.

I guess I am just getting a tad overwhelmed at this is the largest app in scope and size that I have ever written. What is the best approach for this based on my current user permission set-up?