Summary

The Role Manager plugin creates an easy to use interface to manage all the capabilities a user can have. There are five main roles in Wordpress: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber. This plugin makes it easy to control what each of those roles can and cannot do, down to the finite level. It also allows custom role definitions to be made. For instance, a particular user could be set up with a custom role that allows more capabilities than an editor, but less than an administrator. (see Wordpress Documentation for information about what each role can do in InfoTech Tuesday)

Use

The Role Manager plugin adds a number of tabs to the Users menu: Roles, Capabilities, Role-/Capability Management General, Role-/Capability Management Help.

Roles opens up a page listing all the capabilities for each role. By selecting a capability, it is either toggled on or off for that particular role.

Capabilities opens a page in which new capabilities can be defined, which then can be applied to roles. This is an advanced feature and has not been used in InfoTech Tuesday.

Role-/Capability Management General opens a general information page that lists information about the roles, capabilities, and users in the blog.

Role-/Capability Management Help opens a help page and offers more information about the roles and capabilities features the plugin offers.

In addition to these four pages, the plugin also adds a capabilities box at the bottom of each users profile page in the admin. This box allows the admin to edit individual user's capabilities, allowing for customization at the user level.

While roles and capabilities are defined adequately for the current InfoTech Tuesday instantiation, future versions may require role/capability alterations.

Upgrade

There are no modifications to this plugin, so upgrading it is as simple as deactivating, replacing the files with the upgrade, and reactivating. While no changes have been made to the plugin, it has never been upgraded before, so caution should be taken when upgrading (including verifying that the roles settings are restored in the process).