User Roles

Description

WordPress uses a concept of Roles, designed to give the site owner the ability to control what users can and cannot do within the site. A site owner can manage the user access to such tasks as writing and editing posts, creating Pages, defining links, creating categories, moderating comments, managing plugins, managing themes, and managing other users, by assigning a specific role to each of the users.

WordPress has six pre-defined roles: Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. Each role is allowed to perform a set of tasks called Capabilities. There are many capabilities including "publish_posts", "moderate_comments", and "edit_users". A default set of capabilities is pre-assigned to each role.

The Super Admin role allows a user to perform all possible capabilities. Each of the other roles has a decreasing number of allowed capabilities. For instance, the Subscriber role has just the "read" capability. One particular role should not be considered to be senior to another role. Rather, consider that roles define the user's responsibilities within the site.


Summary of Roles

Super Admin – somebody with access to the site network administration features and all other features.

Administrator – somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site.

Editor – somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users.

Author – somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.

Contributor – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.

Subscriber – somebody who can only manage their profile.

Upon installing WordPress, an Administrator account is automatically created.

The default role for new users can be set in Administration Panels > Settings > General.


Roles

A Role defines a set of tasks a user assigned the role is allowed to perform. For instance, the Super Admin role encompasses every possible task that can be performed within a Network of virtual WordPress sites. The Administrator role limits the allowed tasks only to those which affect a single site. On the other hand, the Author role allows the execution of just a small subset of tasks.

The following sections list the default Roles and their capabilities:


Super Admin

Multisite Super Admins have, by default, all capabilities. The following Multisite-only capabilities are therefore only available to Super Admins:

manage_network

manage_sites

manage_network_users

manage_network_themes

manage_network_options


Administrator

The capabilities of Administrators differs between single site and Multisite WordPress installations. All administrators have the following capabilities:

activate_plugins

delete_others_pages

delete_others_posts

delete_pages

delete_plugins

delete_posts

delete_private_pages

delete_private_posts

delete_published_pages

delete_published_posts

edit_dashboard

edit_files

edit_others_pages

edit_others_posts

edit_pages

edit_posts

edit_private_pages

edit_private_posts

edit_published_pages

edit_published_posts

edit_theme_options

export

import

list_users

manage_categories

manage_links

manage_options

moderate_comments

promote_users

publish_pages

publish_posts

read_private_pages

read_private_posts

read

remove_users

switch_themes

upload_files

create_product


Only Administrators of single site installations have the following capabilities. In Multisite, only the Super Admin has these abilities:

update_core

update_plugins

update_themes

install_plugins

install_themes

delete_themes

edit_plugins

edit_themes

edit_users

create_users

delete_users

unfiltered_html


Editor

delete_others_pages

delete_others_posts

delete_pages

delete_posts

delete_private_pages

delete_private_posts

delete_published_pages

delete_published_posts

edit_others_pages

edit_others_posts

edit_pages

edit_posts

edit_private_pages

edit_private_posts

edit_published_pages

edit_published_posts

manage_categories

manage_links

moderate_comments

publish_pages

publish_posts

read

read_private_pages

read_private_posts

unfiltered_html (not with Multisite. See Unfiltered MU)

upload_files


Author

delete_posts

delete_published_posts

edit_posts

edit_published_posts

publish_posts

read

upload_files

Contributor

delete_posts

edit_posts

read


Subscriber

read


Special Cases

The following capabilities are special cases:

unfiltered_upload - This capability is not available to any role by default (including Super Admins). The capability needs to be enabled by defining the following constant: define( 'ALLOW_UNFILTERED_UPLOADS', true ); With this constant defined, all roles on a single site install will be given the unfiltered_upload capability, but only Super Admins will be given the capability on a Multisite install.


See aslo

http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities

source: https://wiki.ubc.ca/Documentation:UBC_Content_Management_System/user_roles

One response to “User Roles”

  1. jpagnott

    Is there any way to limit an editor/author to a particular section of a site? By category or otherwise?

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