In our setup, users are never created by other users. Instead they are created by an external authentication system. The foreign key created_by in model PageUser hence always points onto a dummy user without any privileges.

Therefore the two functions cms.utils.permissions.get_subordinate_users and cms.utils.permissions.get_subordinate_groups can't deliver any useful results, because all users are subordinate of that dummy user. I would therefore like to make those two functions configurable. I already created a prototype and named those two configuration directives CMS_USER_SUBORDINATES and CMS_GROUP_SUBORDINATES .

Is there any objection to this feature?

We also might have to think about making the model PageUser optional. Without the possibility of creating and fetching subordinates, that model doesn't always make sense.

Making these two functions configurable can be achieved by applying this patch:

jrief@80cc54d