Granting Ad-hoc Access to Drupal Content (Nodes)

Drupal’s permissions system provides sufficient flexibility to create an Editor role or similar, enabling a site user to review or optionally edit content prior to publication. But what if you simply want to allow someone to view unpublished content on an ad-hoc basis – perhaps you wish to get a colleague to look over a new blog post, for example – without having to create a role, or you simply wish to restrict it to one particular item of (unpublished) content?

Step forward Peek, which allows you to do just that. Simply designate a content type “peekable”, then depending on the settings per-content type, set your node as “peekable” too. You can then grant a “peek” – a window of time during which a specified user can, by following a special link, gain read-only access to that node. You can configure an expiry time, the length of time it’s valid for and opt to be notified when the content is accessed. It’s a great little module.