General Support - WordPress - WordPress User Roles
WordPress User Roles
Many of CreativeMinds' plugins have features related to User Roles. This guide is an overview of what they are and how they affect the plugins.
What is a User Role?
WordPress allows you to have many registered users on your website. Just like a company has different roles (for instance CEO, manager, accountant, and intern), so does WordPress.
What differs each role are the capabilities.
What are the Capabilities?
Different roles have access to different information.
Company Example
Going back to the example of the company, let's think about financial records.
Not all personnel has access to the financial records - or in other words, not every user has the capability to view them. The CEO and the accountant will surely have the "key" to see all pages, but the managers might have only limited access. And finances probably don't fall under the scope of interns, so they won't be have access at all.
So, in this example:
| Role | Access to Financial Records |
| CEO | Full |
| Accountant | Full |
| Managers | Limited |
| Interns | None |
What About WordPress?
In WordPress, capabilities are related to what users can do on the site. For instance, creating pages, switching themes, updating plugins and even deleting the whole website!
- Super Admin – somebody with access to the site network administration features and all other features. See the Create a Network article.
- Administrator (slug: 'administrator') – somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site.
- Editor (slug: 'editor') – somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users.
- Author (slug: 'author') – somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.
- Contributor (slug: 'contributor') – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.
- Subscriber (slug: 'subscriber') – somebody who can only manage their profile.
So, let's use as an example of the capabilities related to creating and editing posts:
| Role | Access to Creating or Editing Posts |
| Super Admin | Full (Can create, publish and edit all posts) |
| Administrator | Full (Can create, publish and edit all posts) |
| Editor | Full (Can create, publish and edit all posts) |
| Author | Can create and publish posts, but can only edit his/her own posts |
| Contributor | Can create posts, but not publish them; can only edit his/her own posts |
| Subscriber | Cannot create posts; cannot edit posts |
How Do I Edit Roles?
In order to edit or create user roles in WordPress, you need to install certain plugins. Some of these can be found for free on WordPress.org.
What About CreativeMinds' Plugins? Do I Need To Worry About That?
Don't worry: our plugins do all the work for you. Whenever you install a plugin that uses new roles or changes existing ones, this is done automatically.
However, the information in this guide can be useful to understand better some features such as Moderation. One example:
Download Manager Example
The Download Manager plugin allows you to choose if each user can:
- view the downloads
- preview files and use the media player
- upload new files with the need for moderation
- upload new files without the need of moderation
- moderate new downloads
- and more
Additionally, the admin can assign users to groups so that many users have the same capabilities (for instance, a group that can only see files).
In more technical terms, the admin will be assigning different capabilities to each role or user group. Learn more in the specific guide.
Other quick examples
Business Directory with Payments add-on - The admin can allow paying users to add listings. These can be moderated or not, depending on the settings.
Pay Per Post - The admin can the websites restrict content only to paying users.
Locations Manager with Anonymous add-on - The add-on allows the admin to enable even guest users (logged off) to suggest new locations.
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