Enabling CCK Field Permissions (cck_field_perms in Drupal 5, part of CCK itself in Drupal 6) can create bugs on your if you aren't paying attention and cleaning up after it.

Clients don't like their test site competing with their live, production site for Google results. Therefore, we have put our entire set of test sites behind a pop-up requiring basic Apache authentication.

For ongoing maintenance — adding new people to access the test environment behind the authorization wall — the operative command is:

Hi there,

Simply looking at this function is one of the most useful things you can do to understand node access control in Drupal. From the 5.3 version of node.module

/**
 * This function will call module invoke to get a list of grants and then
 * write them to the database. It is called at node save, and should be    

Searching for this led Agaric to this long thread on Access Control Within A Specific Content Type?

which led to:

http://drupal.org/project/nodeaccess

I created a module (attached, in case you're curious) that's a user reference widget. When placed on a node type, it will hide itself and fill itself in from the URL with the person the request is being made of. When a node with the field on it is submitted, it emails the person.

Deep background:

Michelle: Anyone know of some good docs on doing access control? The node chapter of PDD touches on it but not enough for me to really get it and what I'm trying to do is complicated
[10:55am] agentrickard: node access or user access?
[10:55am] Michelle: Well, user access to nodes