Using Unix Groups

Most users will want to be able to modify their content without being root.
The easiest way to achieve this is through the use of Unix Groups; you create
a group to which you add your content editing user, then you add the httpd 
user to that group.

Note that this doesn't easilly extend to more than one user who needs to
edit the files, since at that point you need to set Group write on the files.
One would need to use ACL's to achive this.

For example, we have a user "alice" who needs to edit our content, stored
in /var/www/html/

First we create the content group, then we add both alice and apache to it.

# groupadd www-content 
# usermod -aG www-content <user-name>
# usermod -aG www-content _apache

Now we need to set the right permissions on our files.

# chown -R alice:web-content /var/www/html
# find /var/www/html -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;
# find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;

What we've done here is to set all files to 640, or rw-r----- and directories
to rwxr-x---. Because the group "web-content" is applied to all the files
and directories, httpd can read these files, but cannot write to them.