I was playing around with my test site and think I have come across a permissions bug.  I have checked as and far as I can tell it should work as it is setup.

Basically I created a page called test, created a test user, added the test user to the 'Content Authors' group.  Still logged in as admin I then went to the page settings / Security and clicked the boxes so that content authors can edit the page and can also create pages below it.  I logged out, logged back in as the test user, the home page was viewable with no edit icons as expected and I could edit the content of the Test page in the same was as I could as the administrator but if I click 'new page' via the admin toolbar at the bottom of the screen whilst on the Test page I get this error:

Sorry, you are not allowed to edit this content. If you have questions about your permissions, please contact a site administrator.

As a further test I created a new role called Test Role, assigned the user to it and altered the page setttings to the same as above using the Test Role - the result was the same, the page can be edited but new pages cannot be created below it.

I was also looking at how to restrict features by user - is this possible?  I believe you can choose which features to add on child sites but can you achieve similar based on user roles so that you can limit the choices available to your users?  I was looking at the above as I wanted to be able to create the site with the main/root pages and allow users to change the content on these pages and add sub pages to be created beneath them but not be able to create new main/root pages.......

Hi Joe,

Thanks for getting back to me.  With you not being able to reproduce the issue it suggest it is either something I have done wrong or some issue with the hosting perhaps?  It is not a child site it is just a test site that I setup.  I will email you some more details if you want to take a look.

Thanks also for confirming on the details on the feature / roles.

Cheers

Andrew