WordPress User Roles & Capabilities to control Plugin Access

Posted in Hacking, Hosting, Troubleshoot, Webdesign, Coding & DTP

Alright! For the past few weeks I’ve been able to hold-off requests from teamleaders in our ConnectGiveShare.com website with regards to access to certain matrix administration plugins.

It’s not that I don’t trust them … cause I don’t

Atleast when it comes to managing complex wordpress custom coded websites. Not that they need to, but it only takes 1 wrong mouse click to mess up the entire site and system.

There can only be 1 captain (admin) on a ship (site)!

But … we’ve grown to 300+ members in a short amount of time, and it’s becoming too big to manage everything on my own. But I’m not going to give them admin access. So that’s when it hit me that a few years ago I already did a wordpress project for a client, where I added an user role and gave them limited access. And I was hoping those plugins where still included in My Digital Rolodex … but indeed … they are not So … instead I’m writing this blogpost while I’m researching all the possibilities.

Research

Generic articles

User Role & Capabilities Plugins

Members is a plugin that extends your control over your blog. It’s a user, role, and content management plugin that was created to make WordPress a more powerful CMS.
Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.
With the “User Access Manager”-plugin you can manage the access to your posts, pages and files. You only create a user group, put registered users to this and set up the rights for this group. From now on the post/page is only accessible and writable for the specified group. This plugin is useful if you need a member area or a private section at your blog or you want that other people can write at your blog but not everywhere.
Advanced Access Manager is one of the most popular access control plugins. It is easy-to-use but at the same time very powerful tool that gives you a flexible control over your either single WordPress site or Multisite Network. With AAM you are allowed to configure access to different parts of your website for any Role or individual User.
With User Role Editor WordPress plugin you can change user role (except Administrator) capabilities easy, with a few clicks. Just turn on check boxes of capabilities you wish to add to the selected role and click “Update” button to save your changes. That’s done. Add new roles and customize its capabilities according to your needs, from scratch of as a copy of other existing role. Unnecessary self-made role can be deleted if there are no users whom such role is assigned. Role assigned every new created user by default may be changed too. Capabilities could be assigned on per user basis. Multiple roles could be assigned to user simultaneously. You can add new capabilities and remove unnecessary capabilities which could be left from uninstalled plugins. Multi-site support is provided.
Capability Manager Enhanced provides a simple way to manage WordPress role definitions (Subscriber, Editor, etc.). View or change the capabilities of any role, add new roles, copy existing roles into new ones, and add new capabilities to existing roles. Now supports capability negation and role networking.

All sounds more of the same. Time to do some massive experimenting!