I have an admin superuser created and I am logged in. I can create roles and users, but I cannot edit the permissions of the Developer and Publisher roles that have already been created. All the checkboxes are disabled. Docs say these are not editable.
But the publisher role does not have access to publish or edit anything in the CMS. That can't be right can it?
Its Normal, you can check code base those 2 ROLES are default System Role you can not edit them.
https://github.com/octobercms/october/blob/master/modules/backend/models/UserRole.php#L14
To make role editable you can add your own new role and assign them to users.
In your case you can just duplicate that Publisher role and use it like Custom_Publisher and now you can assign it rights you wanted.
Publisher can not edit anything He can just Publish
Post, Actually it depends on plugin whichrightsthey respect for publishing.
You can see for CMS , Static Page there seems no publishing thing, but for Post plugin you see there is You can Publish Post so it can be useful there.
That is why System Roles [developer, publisher] are not editable, so we don't mess its permissions, and make official supported plugins/packages [CMS, Media, Blog Post, Static Pages ..etc.. ] useless as they depend on that permissions.
To Overcome that you can just
Duplicate Role and Modify it Rightsand assign them to users as per your need.
If you have any doubts please comment.