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