Codex

Roles and Capabilities

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Description

WordPress uses a concept of Roles, designed to give the blog owner the ability to control and assign what users can and cannot do in the blog. A blog owner can manage and allow access to such functions as writing and editing posts, creating Pages, defining links, creating categories, moderating comments, managing plugins, managing themes, and managing other users. The tool that gives the blog owner this control is the ability to assign a Role to a user.

WordPress has five pre-defined Roles: 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. The default Capabilities are pre-assigned to each Role.

The Administrator Role is allowed 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 blog.

The WordPress Plugin API allows Roles and Capabilities to be added, removed and changed. Since Plugins might change Roles and Capabilities, just the default ones are addressed in this article.

Summary of Roles

  • Super Admin - Someone with access to the blog network administration features controlling the entire network (See Create a Network).
  • Administrator - Somebody who has access to all the administration features
  • Editor - Somebody who can publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users' posts, etc.
  • Author - Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
  • Contributor - Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish them
  • Subscriber - Somebody who can only manage their profile

Upon installing WordPress, an Administrator account with all Capabilities is automatically created.

The default role for new users can be set from the Settings General SubPanel.

Roles

A Role defines the set of tasks a user is allowed to perform. For instance, the role of Administrator encompasses every possible task that can be performed within a WordPress blog. 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:

New with 3.0

The documentation needs to be updated to incorporate Multisite, and super admin.

All these capabilities are exclusive to the administrator role.

New with 3.1

Super Admin

Administrator


Editor

Author

Contributor

Subscriber

Capability vs. Role Table

CapabilitySuper AdminAdministratorEditorAuthorContributorSubscriber
manage_network
manage_sites
manage_network_users
manage_network_themes
manage_network_options
activate_plugins
add_users
create_users
delete_plugins
delete_themes
delete_users
edit_files
edit_plugins
edit_theme_options
edit_themes
edit_users
export
import
install_plugins
install_themes
list_users
manage_options
promote_users
remove_users
switch_themes
unfiltered_upload
update_core
update_plugins
update_themes
edit_dashboard
moderate_comments
manage_categories
manage_links
unfiltered_html
edit_others_posts
edit_pages
edit_others_pages
edit_published_pages
publish_pages
delete_pages
delete_others_pages
delete_published_pages
delete_others_posts
delete_private_posts
edit_private_posts
read_private_posts
delete_private_pages
edit_private_pages
read_private_pages
edit_published_posts
upload_files
publish_posts
delete_published_posts
edit_posts
delete_posts
read

Capabilities

switch_themes

edit_themes

  • Since 2.0
  • Allows access to Appearance > Theme Editor to edit theme files.

edit_theme_options

install_themes

activate_plugins

edit_plugins

install_plugins

edit_users

edit_files

  • Since 2.0
  • Note: No longer used.

manage_options

  • Since 2.0
  • Allows access to Administration Panel options:
    • Settings > General
    • Settings > Writing
    • Settings > Reading
    • Settings > Discussion
    • Settings > Permalinks
    • Settings > Miscellaneous

moderate_comments

  • Since 2.0
  • Allows users to moderate comments from the Comments SubPanel (although a user needs the edit_posts Capability in order to access this)

manage_categories

manage_links

upload_files

import

unfiltered_html

  • Since 2.0
  • Allows user to post HTML markup or even JavaScript code in pages, posts, and comments.
  • Note: Enabling this option for untrusted users may result in their posting malicious or poorly formatted code.

edit_posts

  • Since 2.0
  • Allows access to Administration Panel options:
    • Posts
    • Posts > Add New
    • Comments
    • Comments > Awaiting Moderation

edit_others_posts

  • Since 2.0
  • Allows access to Administration Panel options:
    • Manage > Comments (Lets user delete and edit every comment, see edit_posts above)
  • user can edit other users' posts through function get_others_drafts()
  • user can see other users' images in inline-uploading [no? see inline-uploading.php]
  • See Exceptions

edit_published_posts

  • Since 2.0
  • User can edit their published posts. This capability is off by default.
  • The core checks the capability edit_posts, but on demand this check is changed to edit_published_posts.
  • If you don't want a user to be able edit his published posts, remove this capability. (see also this comment on the Role Manager Plugin Homepage).

publish_posts

  • Since 2.0
  • See and use the "publish" button when editing their post (otherwise they can only save drafts)
  • Can use XML-RPC to publish (otherwise they get a "Sorry, you can not post on this weblog or category.")

edit_pages

read

edit_others_pages

  • Since 2.1

edit_published_pages

  • Since 2.1

edit_published_pages

  • Since 2.1

delete_pages

  • Since 2.1

delete_others_pages

  • Since 2.1

delete_published_pages

  • Since 2.1

delete_posts

  • Since 2.1

delete_others_posts

  • Since 2.1

delete_published_posts

  • Since 2.1

delete_private_posts

  • Since 2.1

edit_private_posts

  • Since 2.1

read_private_posts

  • Since 2.1

delete_private_pages

  • Since 2.1

edit_private_pages

  • Since 2.1

read_private_pages

  • Since 2.1

delete_users

  • Since 2.1

create_users

  • Since 2.1

unfiltered_upload

  • Since 2.3

edit_dashboard

  • Since 2.5

update_plugins

  • Since 2.6

delete_plugins

  • Since 2.6

update_core

  • Since 3.0

list_users

  • Since 3.0

remove_users

  • Since 3.0

add_users

  • Since 3.0

promote_users

  • Since 3.0

delete_themes

  • Since 3.0

export

  • Since 3.0

edit_comment

  • Since 3.1

manage_network

  • Since 3.0
  • Multi-site only
  • Allows access to Super Admin menu
  • Allows user to upgrade network

manage_sites

  • Since 3.0
  • Multi-site only
  • Allows access to Network Sites menu
  • Allows user to add, edit, delete, archive, unarchive, activate, deactivate, spam and unspam new site/blog in the network

manage_network_users

manage_network_themes

manage_network_options

User Levels

Prior to version 2.0, WordPress used a user User Levels system. This was replaced in version 2.0 with the much improved and more extensible Roles and Capabilities system you see today. To maintain backwards compatibility with plugins that still use the user levels system (although this is very much discouraged), the default Roles in WordPress also include Capabilities that correspond to these levels. User Levels were finally deprecated in version 3.0.

CapabilityAdministratorEditorAuthorContributorSubscriber
level_10
level_9
level_8
level_7
level_6
level_5
level_4
level_3
level_2
level_1
level_0

User Level to Role Conversion

Change Log

  • 1.5: User Levels system was introduced.
  • 2.0: Roles and Capabilities system was introduced.
  • 3.0: User Levels system deprecated.

Resources

Retrieved from "http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities"

Codex Resources