FEATURE: Backend-only documents

[Sebobo]

Is there an existing issue for this topic?

• I have searched the existing issues

Description

There are many implementations and workarounds to achieve page types that are only available in the backend.

Use cases

• Internal documentation for editors
• Containers for reusable referencable content
• Template pages
• Folders for actual documents

Related issues

• Show non-document-nodes in node tree #1059

Possible Solution

No response

[grizooo]

Edge case from our side

We hit an edge case when using Policies to restrict editor access to certain document types.

Our intention was:

• allow only specific roles to edit template-like documents

• prevent regular editors from modifying them

We used a ReadNodePrivilege / EditNodePrivilege setup for this.
However, denying read access for some roles caused an unexpected side effect:

• anonymous frontend requests could no longer resolve the document

• routing failed before Fusion was executed

• redirects / custom 404 handling in the frontend were no longer possible

• logged-in users still worked, which made this hard to diagnose

So the policy intended to restrict editor access also blocked frontend processing, because routing depends on read access.

A backend-only document concept (or a clear separation between “editor permissions” and “frontend routability”) would avoid this class of problems.

[grizooo]

Granting ReadNodePrivilege is required for routing, but then the document becomes visible again in the backend.
There’s currently no way to allow frontend processing while hiding documents from editors via policies alone.