expressionengine custom membership levels

I'm building my first site using expressionengine and need to create members that work like this:

they can register and set into a开发者_运维百科 pending state. once registered, admin will be able to select members and assign permissions to multiple channels where they will be able to view extra content on the front end.

I'm not sure where to begin looking to handle this and open to suggestions.

I'm also curious, when a members permissions get set, how and where do we access the variables in the front end template and cross reference to get an id of available resources?

You can start by reading up on the Member Management Module (which is pretty good) at: http://expressionengine.com/user_guide/modules/member/overview.html

You'll need to create a sign up form that assigns members to a 'pending' member group (you can do this by requiring that new member sign ups be approved by an administrator). After that, an admin can sign into the EE backend and assign the new member to the appropriate member group (which you'll also have to create and specify permissions for).

Template/page visibility can be toggle on a per template and per member group basis by editing the access preference for the template. The documentation for this is here (scroll down to the 'Access' heading): http://expressionengine.com/user_guide/cp/design/templates/edit_template.html