Until now, the access scheme for the TYPO3 backend was the traditional User-Group-World scheme known from Unix. This, however, is not sufficent when more complex permissions are needed, for example when wanting to apply different permissions to different groups on the same page. Another issue in the current permission system is that the page owners/groups are set to the user and the main group of that user who creates the page.

This are the two scenarios the ACLs want to solve. It is now possible to define on a per-group and per-user basis for pages which permissions are active. ACLs allow pages to have permissions for more than one user/group on a page.

Furthermore, ACLs can work recursively, meaning an ACL doesn't need to be copied to all subpages when it should apply there as well. This makes handling permissions easier.

You can see the permissions for each group where there is an ACL set here. This screen shows you for example that there is a new ACL on “page1” for the group “g1” (because the permissions change there.)

There is a new user/group selector in the “Permissions” view which can be found in Web->Access. With these selectors it is possible to define which groups and users should be shown in the matrix. This makes especially bigger matrices easier to handle.