User Roles in WordPress

Probably one of the nicest things about email or copying from blog to blog. 

As an administrator you are also able to approve or schedule when certain posts go live.  This is also a very handy tool if you are pushing out a high volume of content to your readers.

Below you will find some information about user roles inside of WordPress that I grabbed from the WordPress Codex…

The WordPress Roles feature is designed to give the blog owner the ability to control and assign what users can and cannot do in the blog. A blog owner must manage and allow access to such functions as writing and editing Posts, creating Pages, defining Links, creating Categories, moderating Comments, managing Plugins, managing Themes, and managing other users. The tool that gives the blog owner that control is the ability to assign a Role to a user.

WordPress Version 2.0

WordPress Version 2.0 introduces the concept of Roles. The WordPress distribution comes delivered ‘standard’ with five pre-defined Roles:

Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber. Each Role is allowed to perform a set of tasks called Capabilities. There are thirty Capabilities including publish_posts, moderate_comments, and edit_users. The Capabilities are pre-assigned to each Role.

The Administrator Role is allowed to perform all possible Capabilities. Each of the other Roles has a decreasing number of allowed Capabilities. For instance, the Subscriber Role is allowed just the read and level_0. One particular Role should not be considered to be ‘senior to’ another Role. Rather, consider that Roles define the user’s responsibilities within the blog.

Plugin developers will likely revise the ‘standard’ Roles and Capabilities because WordPress Developers left open the future possibility of assigning a user to one or more Roles, or assigning Capabilities directly to a User. Since Plugins might change Roles and Capabilities, just the ‘standard’ Roles and Capabilities are addressed in this article.

Super Powers for Blog Owner

The person with the most important Role is that of blog owner. Typically, the blog owner is the person responsibile for maintaining and

backing up the WordPress MySQL database as well as managing the WordPress repository of files (programs, scripts, plugins, themes, images, uploads). Ultimately, the smooth operation of a blog depends on the blog owner fulfilling this ‘ultimate role’. Note: The blog owner, in many cases, also acts the Role of Administrator but may choose to assign other users the Administrator Role.

Summary of Roles

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
• Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc.

Roles

The identity a particular user assumes in a blog is called their Role. A Role essentially describes the set of tasks, called

Capabilities, a person is allowed to perform. For instance, the role of Administrator encompasses every possible task that can be performed within a WordPress blog. On the other hand, the Author role allows the execution of just a small subset of tasks.

WordPress 2.0 simplifies the User Level approach of WordPress 1.5 by rolling up adjacent levels with similar permissions into logical, named roles. For example, Level 0 is now assigned to the Subscriber role, while Levels 5-7 together make up the Editor role.

Roles and Capabilities « WordPress Codex