If you run a multi-user site with WordPress, I probably don’t have to tell you that managing that site sucks. You’ve probably went through the handful of plugins available and have hacked together bits and pieces of code just to keep your site afloat.
After looking around and playing with some different plugins, I didn’t find anything that suited my goals. Of course, I decided I’d just make the plugin myself.
I posted about the plugin on Twitter a few days ago and was surprised at the responses I received. It seems many of you are looking for the same things. So, I’m going to ask for your help with this project.
The goal of this plugin is to be a complete management system for users, roles, and permissions. I want it to fit in with your administration panel and feel like it has always been there. It needs to work completely within the bounds of WordPress too. I’ve seen some plugins that don’t take advantage of WordPress’s roles and capabilities system.
In this post, I’ll list some of the things I’ve been working on and show you how they’re developing. Then, I’ll let you share your ideas.
The plugin components
Since this will be a massive plugin with loads of different features once it’s finished, I thought it’d be best to build a components system. Basically, what I’m doing is separating each feature into a unique component. Each can be turned on or off by the site administrator.
It’s a sort of use-only-what-you-need system. It’ll also allow me to more easily extend the plugin in the future with additional components. Plus, it’s easier to keep the plugin organized this way.
Plugin components settings
Role management
I think a lot of people will be excited about being able to manage user roles with an easy-to-use interface. This component will allow you to give users with specific roles only the capabilities you want them to have.
Management of each role's capabilities
In addition to being able to manage roles, you’ll be able to create them. The New Roles page will allow you to create new roles and attach specific capabilities to those roles that can later be managed through the Manage Roles panel.
Create new roles for your WordPress blog
User capabilities
This feature will no longer be a part of the plugin. WordPress is changing the the user/role/capability system. Users will only be able to have a single role and no additional capabilities. Thanks to James Collins for his comment on this.
Typically, a user gets a certain role. That user can then only do the things allowed within the scope of that role. What happens when you want an editor of your blog to have more control but not be an administrator?
You grant (or deny) that user additional capabilities from his or her profile screen. This allows the user to work outside of their role’s capabilities if you want them to.
Capabilities management for individual users
Other components
The above components are what I’ve spent the most time working on thus far, which is why they’ve been highlighted. I also have a few other features I’d like to add before releasing this plugin in any form:
- Content Permissions
Adds an additional meta box for the post/page editor that allows you to grant permissions for who can read the content based on the the user’s capabilities or role. - Login Widget
Creates a widget that you can place in any widget area for users to log in from the front of your site by entering their username and password. - Shortcodes
Provides a set of shortcodes that may be used to restrict or provide access to certain areas of your site from within the post editor (like the shortcodes I posted in Using shortcodes to show members-only content). - Template Tags
Provides additional template tags for use within your WordPress theme for restricting or providing access to certain content.
What are your ideas?
I’ve given you a bit of what I have in mind for the initial release, but I’m not the only person that’ll be using this plugin. If you run a multi-user site, now’s the time to chime in. Tell me what you hate about the current system. Tell me what you’d like to see.
If you’re confused about anything in the post, feel free to ask me about it. I’ll try my best to explain.
Time frame? I hope to have some sort of beta out within the next week or two (I’ll definitely need some beta testers), but that depends on a lot of different factors. In short, it’ll be ready when it’s ready.
- Restriction for number of posts (for paid authors) – maybe combined with a “subscribe-like” feature.
(When paid or guest authors role expired, change back to default “subscriber”.)
Looks promising and _really_ usefull – “I can’t wait” plugin…
My ideal would be user specific content. For example, I’d like to give certain users (my clients) access to both their own pages and common client pages. I suspect this doesn’t come under the spec for you plugin, though. If anyone know how to do this with WP I’d appreciate a pointer in the right direction (and I know there are probably more appropriate CMS’s than WP for this but I’m enjoying WP.
Regards, Edward
Hi Justin,
This plugin sounds great. I have always felt that the WordPress user/role/capability management system was lacking.
Last month on the weekly WordPress developer IRC meeting, there was a discussion regarding a user/role overhaul for WordPress v2.9.
The relevant trac ticket is here. From memory they were planning on removing support for “user capabilities”
James
User should get a (custom) notice when their rights are changend, e.g.:
Hello $user! From now on you can’t publish vowels anymore!
But why not just extending the Role Manager (http://www.im-web-gefunden.de/wordpress-plugins/role-manager/)?
This sounds really great Justin:)
How about widgets based on user roles to filter content?
Is it possible to add the option that people logs in with facebook connect or friend connect?
Justin, there is a login widget you can download from this post: http://wpmututorials.com/plugins/login-widget/. It returns the user to the page that they logged in from. Feel free to incorporate it into the user management plugin.
Very promising…
I’d be so happy if you’d also enhance the user bio section – easy to add text, images, urls and easy to display (parts of) in templates. Not only as meta information on posts but also as lists of members.
Can’t wait!
I’d love to have the ability to mark specific pages (or other elements) as accessible only to specified roles. This would be great for distributing content from the “small business” point of view where the WP site owner is working with several partner companies with shared and private content, and each partner company potentially has multiple employees.
Thanks,
- Jon
Hi,
would be great to have the abillity to integrate Paypal payment in case you want to create a “members only” area for people who have paid for premium content such as support or specific downloads.
ctrlshift — Yeah, I’d like to eventually add in something with payments and such, but I’ll have to get someone familiar with PayPal-type integration to code that particular component.
Edward Robson — The Content Permissions component might be right up your alley. From what I understand, you’d only need to restrict pageviews according to capability or role.
All of this is possible with WordPress. There’s just not a lot of plugin options.
James Collins — Thanks for pointing out that ticket. It’ll sure make things a bit easier. I’d prefer to get rid of the user-capability feature anyway and just stick capabilities to roles only. It definitely simplifies things (though makes it a little less flexible).
Thomas Scholz — That would be a cool feature and an important one. Thanks for bringing up that idea.
I want a specific type of foundation that lends itself well to adding more components in the future. I don’t really feel Role Manager does that well.
Adam W. Warner — I’m thinking of adding something like a checkbox or something on each widget to allow or disallow specific roles. Of course, this can already be done with the Widget Logic plugin using
current_user_can(), but it’d be nice to have this type of thing built in.Jaime Crixems — This would be something that deals specifically with things within WordPress.
Ron — Thanks. I’ll take a look at it.
Lisa Risager — Great idea! This would be something cool for multi-blogger sites. I wonder if we could move over the visual editor to the user profile page…
Jonathan Pruett — This is definitely in the works. I’m already building a meta box to add to the post/page editor that will allow you to choose who sees it.
Michael Oeser — Eventually, I’d like to bring on another developer that knows about PayPal integration (well outside my area of expertise) and have him code this. This is part of the reason I’m building this with the “components” idea — easy to build on top of.
Some sort of login redirect would be great, either based on where they previously were, or to a specific location based on their role.
Looks like James sort of beat me too it but now that we have a little more info regarding the new system that will be in place for Roles and Capabilties, I was wondering how this will affect your plugin or the flexibility it will contain versus what the devs are thinking of adding.
http://www.wptavern.com/forum/general-wordpress/699-new-way-doing-user-roles-capabilities.html
Why not use the Role Manager plugin as a base for this idea and improve upon it with what you want it to do?
Does the new dev talk about roles change anything regarding the development/concept?
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10201#comment:24
@Edward Robson: What you want is currently possible with the wpNamedUsers plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpnamedusers/ I currently use it for exactly the same purpose. It’s lightweight and much easier to use/configure than Role Manager or Role Scoper.
@Nile: Role Manager is cumbersome to work with, and leaves all of its options in the database when it’s uninstalled. I’d much rather see Justin code up something from scratch that’s clean and easy to use.
@Justin: As I said on Twitter when you first posted about this, I am very much looking forward to testing/working with this plugin. I don’t have much to add in the way of specific feature requests – you’ve got a fabulous set of features in it already.
How will this compare to Role Scoper:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/role-scoper/
ATM your new one seems to fall somewhere in-between ‘Role Scoper’ and ‘Role Manager’ is this a fair assumption??
This plugin sounds perfect, I’ve been looking for something like this but lacking the technical know-how to get it done. I would love to have a paid-subscribers only page/blog within my site that incorporated paypal. Like what Michael Oeser said above. Thanks for tackling this!
-Will
One thing I’d love to see is the ability to hide admin widget components for different user classes.
As an example, the Author class of writers would never need the Excerpt, or Trackback, or if installed, All-in-one-seo widgets.
Would be great to see a full list of all the available widgets on the main dashboard as well as the post composition page, and choose to display/hide certain ones for certain user classes.
I am verymuch interested in beta testing this plugin. Please sent me a copy when it is available.
Vinny Troia — Yeah, all the login and logout forms will redirect back to the current page.
And, you just gave me another idea — a login/logout form shortcode.
Jeffro — This won’t hurt the plugin at all. It’ll actually make my life a lot easier. It’ll probably make it easier for users to manage too. The roles/capabilities API isn’t really changing that much. They’re just taking a way a few things that are rarely used.
Nile — For the same reasons I’ve already said and the reasons Kim said.
John Myrstad — Not much. It’ll just take away from the User Capabilities component I added in. Overall, that ticket is probably a good thing for this plugin.
Kim — Thanks. I hope to have the beta out in the next couple of weeks, so I’ll let you know.
mkjones — That would probably be a fair assumption. I don’t like the way a lot of things are handled in Role Scoper. This plugin will definitely have some different things to offer though.
willyons — I’d like to see a paid-subscribers method at some point in the future as well. I just want to build the foundation first, then have another developer come in and do the work on this later.
Travis — Are you talking about meta boxes?
Santhosh — I’ll let you know when it’s ready for testing.
Justin,
Yes, having the option to control the visibility of meta boxes by user class was what I was trying to say
Hey Justin, it looks like a fantastic project!
If I make a UI suggestion. Instead of listing all the roles on one page, with all the checkboxes. I think you should have a page that lists all the roles, and then you select one and go to an edit role screen. If you have a lot of roles, this will make the edit screen less cluttered and overwhelming.
I would also suggest on this screen an area where you can easily see 1) Who currently is assigned to this role and 2) A way to assign this role to users right from the Edit Role screen itself.
If you have tested the Gravity Forms plugin I sent you, this would be similar to the Forms list for the list Roles and the Edit Forms screen for the Edit Roles screen. Obviously with different options.
I wouldn’t try and cram everything on one screen. Turn it into a full blown role management solution and break it up into logical screens and really go all out.
I’m very interested in seeing how this turns out.
Justin,
Is this also available, or this plugins can be use for buddy press?
Thanks.
I’m so excited about this plugin. My wallet is out and ready for this one. I’m willing to break my sites to test out this puppy (well, maybe a few sites).
One key feature that I love about a Drupal user management, is the ability to “on-the-fly” (jQuery username lookup) to assign viewable permissions on individual pages. So that during the creation of the page/post there would be a small box that said something like:
This page only viewable by: (input box)
And then the page/post creator would be able to start typing in the name of a user or the name of a group, and it auto-populates the field. (Similar to how the “tags” section appears)
I’ve got one client who would love this type of simple functionality in their support section. They want to grant permissions to individuals when needed to see certain posts, then remove/add new users/etc. as time goes on.
The plugin looks great! It does look a bit like the Role Manager plugin. I use that one and what I would love to have is:
I use Wordpress for my clients and I never give them the Administrators role, but always the editors role. I keep the administrator role for myself. As an administrator, I can have full control over the site of my clients and give my clients only the capacaties that they need.
The problem there is that I can’t give them the capacity to add and edit new roles and users. If I give them that capacity they can, delete my edit/delete my admin account and I won’t be able to assist them. But most clients want to be able to make new users and give them some capacities (some sites have more writers etc).
Desired solution: To be able to give my clients the capacity to ad new roles and capacities without the possibility to delete the administrator role. Sort of speak > the administrator role overrules everything else. The editors role should then also overrule everything below that role, and so on.
Another suggestion:
Widget control:
What I would love, is to be able to assign what widgets the editor and below roles can use and configure. At the moment, if I pass this capacity, the users can edit all widgets and also the theme files. Meaning they could mess up many things. If the administrator role could “activate” widgets or “lock” widgets, it would be more flexible. This way editors or lower roles are able to add and edit widgets which the administrator assigns.
I think it would make wordpress much more flexible, especially for larger sites with more users!
Hi Justin! Great idea to build this type of plugin up from scratch!
I’d suggest that the plugin includes modifying the settings/tools as some plugins management sits on these admin menus.. do I explain myself?
Best!
Joaquín.-
This is good. Now Peoples will register and more enjoy from blog. Registered people will past more times on blog.
Carl Hancock — That’s a great suggestion. It’d be like the edit posts screen. I haven’t tested Gravity Forms, so I assume that’s what it looks like.
Simon Wilby — I don’t really know anything about BuddyPress. It’ll work with WordPress, so I’m guessing it’ll work along with BuddyPress.
Benjamin — That does sound cool. I might have to bring a jQuery programmer on board at some point to handle this.
You won’t need to break your wallet out for this plugin though. I plan on making it completely free and open source.
Alen Sirovica — I understand your concern with certain roles being able to overwrite the administrator, but taking this away goes against the capabilities system in WordPress. “Administrator” is simply an arbitrary name. It could be called “God of the Site” or whatever. Roles in WordPress aren’t hierarchical. For example, a subscriber could have more capabilities than an administrator if I wanted. There’s no such thing as being above or below someone else. There’s simply what you can do and what you can’t do.
Joaquin — I’m not sure I completely understand. Could you explain?
Hey thaks for your reply. What I meant is that users that aren’t Admins can’t manage plugins that sits under Settings or Tools menu. For instance, there’s a plugin called WP Testimonials that let you add a pieces of text to randomly display wherever you want to, right? Well the admin panel to input these pieces of text is on the Settings menu, under “WP Testimonials”. If a user is not an Admin he can’t see it or enter a piece of text.
Then, it’ll be great if the plugin looks for activated plugins and where are they managed from (Settings or Tools on most of the cases) and let you enable the management of those you ticked for a especific group of users.
Make sense now? Hope so!
Joaquin — I understand now, but I think you might misunderstand a little bit about roles. As I mentioned to Alen earlier, roles in WordPress aren’t hierarchical. Roles are defined by a set of capabilities. It’s a matter of what one can or can’t do.
It’s the responsibility of plugin authors to choose which capability grants access to the plugin’s settings screen.
Let’s say the Super Duper plugin was installed on your site. It adds an admin screen. This admin screen should only be accessed by users that can
edit_posts(capability). Who accesses this stuff is based on capability, not role. And, it should be handled by individual plugins.Since there is no hierarchy, I can’t decide which role is more important than another. Some people may choose to remove some of the administrator’s capabilities. Others may only give administrators the
readcapability.Oh..
I see. Sorry for my ignorance! So what I should try to do is to create a plugin (not that I’ve ever done this) that somehow edit activated plugins and add a ‘capability’ which can probably match a user role created with your near-to-come plugin.. and let other users to manage them.
Anyway, thanks for your reply again and broadening my knowledge on this!
Justin,
Yes its like the Edit Posts screen. You would view a list of roles just like you view a list of posts. Then select a specific role and go to the Edit Role screen. This will provide you with much more flexibility longterm rather than trying to cram all the roles on a single screen.
I would also suggest sticking to the WordPress classes for styling the UI as much as possible, that way it really feels like it is part of the WordPress core and users are more comfortable using it.
Very excited to see what you come up with.
Carl
@ Justin and Alen,
I’m really intrigued by the possibility of assigning capabilities to roles that manage whether or not a role can add/edit/delete various widgets…and also what roles can view various widgets (or other content) on the front end.
I’ve been looking for a plugin to help me manage a multi-author site for awhile. I’ve found things to manage roles, and to allow for HTML in the Profiles, but what I could really use is an implementation of Wordpress Stats by user. I’ve used Blog Metrics, which shows number of posts, words, comments etc. by user, but what I really want is Pageviews per author, for a specified period of time (since that is how I pay people). Really if the interface was just like Wordpress stats, but allowed you to pick an Author, that would be perfect. Not sure if this relates much to your plugin, or if I should direct the suggestion to the Wordpress Stats people.
Alen’s comments and your replies notwithstanding, this is a really important feature that is missing from WordPress: namely, the ability to grant users with specified roles the right to manage user accounts in other specified roles. It could be about letting editors manage contributors, or any other combination, with a settings page that remains administrator only.
I’m in the early stages of writing a plugin to achieve it, by using the old “levels” (I’m lazy) and a fresh, simpler, user management page (did I mention I’m lazy). However I’m relatively new to the WordPress API, so if you have any better ideas (involving hooks and actions maybe) I’d (we’d?) love to hear about them.
I second Alen Sirovica’s and ZigPress’ suggestions. Cascading user managing rights would be very useful. This should be possible somehow.
I’m using a combination of Role Manager (already mentioned in comments), Admin Menu Editor (http://w-shadow.com/blog/2008/12/20/admin-menu-editor-for-wordpress/) and WP Super Edit (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-edit/) to try to
a. create custom user Roles
b. hide certain admin menus and sub-menus from certain Roles (setting the User Level on admin menus in coordination with the custom Roles’ user levels)
c. control which TinyMCE functions are seen by all Roles
It’s a hackish way of doing it, but it ‘usually’ works ok for Wordpress.org installs, and works with a caveat for Wordpress MU installs – on MU, I have to set up EVERY SINGLE ONE of the above three plugins for EACH MU blog install. If there was a way to do SITEWIDE Roles in MU, I’d jump for joy.
The ability to hide all the different aspects of the dashboard and the write panel and post listing etc etc etc is a biggy for me….
User roles is a huge mess in Wordpress. Glad you’re taking the initiative on this Justin.
I love Wordpress, but it can be a big headache when the client handoff takes place.
It would be very nice if you could add another component to set per user permissions to edit post/pages.
It may be accomplished by doing something similar to what Alan Collins did with his plugin. At leas there should be compatibility between the two plugins.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/users-only/
What about having limiting the categories that different authors can post to?
@JuanT
Great idea
A decent role management plugin, with permission-sets and UI like what you’ve got there, looks exactly like what i’ve been wishing for myself… Looks like i wont have to write it myself afterall
One request, Please use WP_DEBUG whilst writing it, just so you don’t have millions of E_NOTICE level warnings, Thats my main annoyance with most plugins out there right now, written by people who shouldn’t be writing them in the first place
– Don’t destroy my hope of this Plugin being great like it needs to be! (Looking through a few of your entries though, Looks like you know your stuff)
Hi,
Great idea Justin,
I’m currently working on a multi-user site, and one of the points is the dashboard. Not all the widgets in the dashboard should be seen by everybody, so i started a plugin here
http://changewordpress.com/plugins/dashboard-widgets-depending-on-user-role
I thought you may like to integrate it in your plugin.
More troubles, an author should manage only it’s own posts, and the comments they recieve, so the post and comments admin pages should be changed to distribute the managing functions into the authors (or any similar role) .
I like the ability of the plugin admininimize, to hide admin menu options for specific roles, so that can be used to.
did you know about this?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/capsman/
The Capability Manager plugin provides a simple way to manage role capabilities.
Justin,
I want to be your beta tester. I need a plugin like this for my social activity. I believe that your plugin is the best.
I recently created a website for a client with many users.
This is a private website for registered users only (Intranet).
I had to combine several plugins to achieve the desired result but only one thing I failed to do and I think it would be interesting to have him as a plugin.
I created some custom write panels reading a post in wefunction to add the address of some PDF documents (Data sheets of some products).
It would be good to write a custom panel system where you choose whether text, image, file, etc.. If is for text an input text should appear, if is for an image or file should have a button “Upload or Browse” to select the file that upload on the server and automatically assign the url in the custom field to avoid uploading a file and copy the url to paste in the custom write panel.
I hope you understand. Excuse me if my english level is not so good.
Thanks.
I just released a new plugin called ‘Multiple Profile Types’, perhaps it can be of use to you. This plugin makes it possible to maintain multiple profiles and registration forms (role-bound).
You can read more about it here: Multiple Profile Types (original post is in Dutch, translation by Google Translate so it can be weird).
Not sure whether this comes under user management, but I would expect to be able to capture custom data in user registration AND display it in A&U page as well as make user groups. This was found sorely lacking during a recent project in spite of using 3 plugins. In fact I wonder why it is not a part of the core…
But this will be tremendously helpful.
Thanks
icubyx
Joaquin — Nope. You don’t create a plugin that provides capabilities to use the settings pages for other plugins. The capability is done on a plugin-by-plugin basis. The individual plugin author decides which capability gets access to those pages.
Carl Hancock — Yes, that’s definitely better for more flexibility in the longterm. I’ve now implemented it in my dev version.
PVanderVossen — I’d argue that falls more under a stats plugin too. Of course, since this plugin is being built with a component-based system, it should allow others to easily add on to it with new components.
ZigPress and Thomas Scholz — I think the biggest issue here is that we need to break out of this thinking that roles are hierarchical. They’re not. Roles are just a set of capabilities. So, someone can get the capability to manage users. They don’t manage users just because they have a “higher” level than other users. There is no such thing as a higher level. It’s simply either the user can do this or the user cannot do this.
Now, one could certainly write a plugin that caters to that custom scenario.
cas — Thanks for the links to the plugins. I’ll check them out and see if they’d be a good fit with this plugin.
Pete — Could you go into more detail with your idea?
Dave — They’re not too big of a mess. The messy part is that there needs to be a standard way of controlling them, which is what this plugin is about.
John Myrstad — Thanks for the idea and link. I’m wondering how possible this will be with the upcoming changes. If nothing else, it should definitely still be possible with roles. I’ll look more into it as I continue with the plugin.
JuanT — I’ll look into it. I’m just not sure how feasible it is at the moment.
DD32 — I’ll try not to destroy your hopes.
I’m taking the development of this one very slowly, so I’m hoping for a great plugin in the end.
marquex — Thanks for all the suggestions and the link to your plugin. Several people have been asking for something to control the dashboard widgets.
kilroy — Nope. I’ve never heard of it.
Agus — Cool. I’ll write a blog post when it’s ready for beta testing.
Gerard — I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand. I’m not sure what this plugin has to do with custom meta boxes.
Hiranthi — Thanks for the link to your plugin. I’ll check it out and see how well it works with this plugin.
icubyx — Yes, custom registration data would be nice, and it’s definitely something I have planned for the long haul (probably not the initial release though).
WordPress already provides a user group system. Instead of “groups,” they’re called “roles.”
I’d also be happy to be a beta tester. I’ve been looking for something like this for my clients sites and I’d be very willing to test it to pieces and provide feedback.
Thanks Justin
I am palnning a multi user blog in which most of the paramers are going to be the same.
An attribute of inherit might be very useful to me.
I mean we decalre one users’ parameters and the other managers will inherit most of these parameres.
Thanks
Mattbob — Thanks. The first version should be available in the next week or so.
מתנה לחג — As I’ve tried to explain over and over here in the comments, roles are not hierarchical. One role cannot inherit from another role. Roles are just sets of capabilities.
Seamless integration with bbPress, BuddyPress, and WordPress MU…and/or their “dominate” plugins to do the same…and maybe some sensible means to integrate other PHP/MySQL-based forum, e-commerce evironments as well (PHPbb, Zen-Cart?).
It would probably would minimally require some detection/awareness logic and then replicating or creating a correspondence table for “rights”…that would map into your implementation. This would definitely be a candidate for a “plugin” to your “plugin” type of scenerio.
This is a predominate issue since most “significant” sites eventually add a forum – and thus far, the current cross-environment administration issues have been either limited, difficult to synchronize, restrictive in their conceptualization, or operationally “troublesome”….
On the otherhand – solving this problem would win MANY converts to the Hybrid platform and could establish Hybrid as the “integrative framework” of choice.
I think that is the “text book” definition for “opportunity”…and I mention it here for “completeness” only. It’s probably not a first-pass exercise – but should guide your implementation in terms of architecture. In other words – it’s a long-standing insufficiency.
Among the daunting challenges:
– Mapping disparate roles and capabilities across different paradigms
– Synchronizing “logged-in” status
– Coordinating “rights” data bases and administrative screens
– Synchronization and re-synchronization with the native, individual mechanisms, when they are unavailable for indeterminate periods of time
– Maintaining a secure implementation, not prone to attack and consistent with the encryption techniques used by each individual environment
A proper implementation woiuld probably include a proper “object model” associated with activities and entities, such that an ACL (access control list) could be associated with them (but not necessarily, comprehensively) – Sort of a “super administrative” framework – which would then be “sparsely populated” according to the target’s existing paradigm model…Unfortunately, this is lacking in each native environment which has, instead, made certain assumptions regarding the accessibility of various objects by group classification.
One approach might be to build the central architecture and then entice the authors in the other enviroments to adopt your model or integrate theirs into your own….with the “carrot” being that their offerring now can seamlessly integrate with the others.
At its root the problem scope and comprehensiveness of solution is determined by the level of granularity that is provided, and the additional overhead associated with “dragging rights around” with objects – as well as the inherent complexity of administrration. The comments to your post here.. are already indicative of just how prevalent the concept of hierarchies “creep in” to the discussion – when its really an “state-object-action” issue
Minimally, I’d recomend that you familiarize yourself with the associated forum and e-commerce rights issues by reviewing the discussions at bbPress and SimpleForum – before I committed myself to a Hybrid-centric implementation – Just to give yourself some “breathing room” later…
The SimpleForum implemementaiton is particularly well-done, in my opinion – and it resides entirely within the framework of a plugin.
Needless to say, based on our private correspondence, implementation could establish some new, differentiated roles for Hybrid – such as that of “Designer” which would shield or reveal capabilities within the framework or child themes’ administration or configuration functions.
I inadvertantly “munged” the name of the Forum Plugin – It’s actually “SimplePress:Forum”
http://simplepressforum.com/
So glad to hear somebody is working on a project like this. Because of it, I have decided to convert my current website into wordpress. It currently has 3 wordpress installs on it all of which are using an “external database authentication” plugin so that users who created an account on my main page (not wordpress) can sign into wordpress without themselves needing to register again.
The thing I really need though is the ability to let facebook connect, twitter, and google to be able to automatically create an account. I found on my non wordpress site that it was really easy to add facebook connect and google friend connect to my site, however I was unsure of how to make their accounts automatically generate an account on my database with their choice of usernames and other form data.
I think integration with social networks like these will really be key to getting new users registered and I would hate to have to try to get several different login plugins to try to play well together. So is it possible to add something to your framework that allowed those sites as well as other sites API’s to be able to generate accounts and authenticate into wordpress?
Then could it be taken a step further to allow existing users to “tie in” their sites to their login? This would allow various cookies to authenticate their login so they don’t have to login again. If it were up to me, people would login once and never be logged out ever again based on all the sites that they can authenticate with.
Ok let me explain my last comment a bit more… As the admin I want a few different users to have different access to different parts of the admin panels… I don’t want other authors posts listed in their edit screen for example…
I dont’ want them to choose any category they want.. i want only the categories i let them choose from
I want to be almighty, all powerful ‘god’ in so far as what they ‘see’ and what they can ‘access’ and what they can ‘use’ within the admin backend.
I want pretty much every thing that can be changed or deleted or added in the admin panel to be under my total control …. [insert evil laugh]
PayPal integration would be awesome. The overall plugin really sounds great. Sounds as if, with this plugin and Hybrid and its child themes, that we could have SuperWP or something of that sort to be installed as a bundle.
I agree with Matt, Paypal would be a good module to add. But I would also love to see the functionality of other types of payment processors (Google Checkout, etc) as well.
Hey Justin, just ran across this and I’m really excited to see that you’re working on this. I have nothing to add yet that wouldn’t be repetitive, but please add my name to the beta testers pool; I’d love to help out there.
Thanks for the work put in!
Not sure if these things have come up yet
It’s simple enough to restrict parts of posts, but I’d like the ability to restrict a post’s comments as well, I mean the viewing of them. That is, if a post is primarily meant to be private but I want to show a teaser for it and I want it to be indexed in search engines, so everyone can see that teaser, but I don’t want everyone to be able to read that post’s comments.
For moderating comments I’d like the ability to set “moderate own posts comments only”. So there’s a global moderate_comments and a limited author based moderate_comments.
Hi,
I am looking for similar plugin which includes more features like
1) Allow only perticular users to download pdf format of wordpress articles
2) The above can be done for any plugin controls like printing,email etc
I hope this idea helps to improve your plugin features
I understand that plugin developers must check capabilities such as ‘can-edit-post’ before showing-allowing their corresponding menu item.
However, many plugin devs don’t create their own new capability. Thus, I can’t configure a role for a particular plugin’s capability.
How can we supplement that shortfall by self-creating a new capability and connecting it to a plugin? Without modifying that plugin. Just through API-calls.
In summary, I’d like to give specified Users the ability to interact with only specific plugins. But plugins usually don’t have their own capbilities.
Thanks!
Sounds like a great idea. 1 great feature would user pruning. An easy solution for finding and deleting inactive users.
Another would be having a user directory included.
We’re using several plug-ins to get what I need for the moment.
1 to add fields to the user profiles
1 to add a user photo
1 to for the directory itself
Would be lovely to have an all in1 solution.
this is all very promising! I’m developing a project that is hanging out for something like this. I’d be happy to help you beta test it as we’d probably give it a good workout.
cheers
Paul
I’ve read through just about everything I could find on this plugin but I didn’t catch any discussion/reveals regarding registration. Do you already have something set for this version in regard to new registrations? If so, can you tell us about it ~ I’m particularly interested in Dashboard exposure. Thanks.
Hi Justin!
I hope you integrate on it a private messaging system on it so members can send messages for other members on a wordpress blog…
Thanks!
This plugin sounds great. I have always felt that the WordPress user/role/capability management system was lacking.
Love your newsletters! Thank you! Can this plugin be used to create a “myspace” type environment where users can update their own Page (only), select/upload their custom backgrounds, etc.?
does it allow auto role assigning to a newly registered users?
i mean.. i wan’t all my new users to be the author right away upon completing registration….
I think that the information presented should be useful to many people a lot.
What about joining all the features of “Adminize” (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adminimize/) and making a all-in-one plugin?
When we’ll have a beta version?
I tried to get it but no go.and i confronted two inssues first is using the Builder theme, I can’t actually browse to the User Management tool.If I change the theme to “Left” then I can see it under browse.second problem is Going to it I get this message: “You can not manage user-groups associated with this wiki space. Please check with Confluence Administrators.”
Great work.Can this plugin support category’s acess perrmission?
great job justin
I’ve been looking around for such a plugin for years (tried a lot but never satisfy) to manage my blog community and built the pay-per-read model on my wp site. I although use subscribe2 to send custom newsletter to groups of users.
would it be possible to bridge the two and have a capacitie such as receive_newsletter_one ?
thanks again
lsm
OMG… you always come with a great idea… good job brotha!
Great Plugin!
I would like to give all subscribers editing permissions to create a wiki-like environment. This is very easily achieved with your plugin. However, I am trying to find some way that I can get a feed of all revisions that take place. I tried searching dashboard widgets, and revisions etc. If anyone knows how I can do this, it would be a big help.
Thanks!
hi justin,
does this plugin provide an option to restrict what meta boxes (including those from plugins) appear on a write post/page for specified roles?
I’d like my subscribers to be able to manage their posts, but I don’t want to show them the lists of all, and unpublished posts, even if they can’t edit them, they shouldn’t see the lists at all.
Thanks
I see that I can add a capability. But I do not see a way to remove that same capability later from within your plugin.
This is something which should have been put into motion within Wp itself other than a plugin. This is the one pet hate I don’t like about WP. For me I woul like to see a widget in your UMP (User Management Plug-in) where subscriber users and WP management logged into WP in two seperate locations.
In other words, login with username and password brought them back to the index.php and WP Management were taken to the dashboard. I like your idea and I think it’s a brilliant plugin which I am really looking forwards to seeing completed and being used on my site.
Keep up the good work, awesome brilliant idea 10/10 no… 100% awesome.
Regards,
Simon
Hi Justin,
Great work on this plugin. It works great. I was wondering if there’s any way you can extend the plugin so as to set per-role permissions on an entire category. This way, if I have a category for paid content, I don’t have to worry about accidentally not setting the role permissions correctly for EVERY new post.
I LOVE the fact that I can choose which of this plugin’s feature sets I want enabled. If only more plugins worked that way. Thanks for saving me from some bloat.
Thanks!!
I would love have a user sign up integrate with getresponse autoresponder/list management.
Hi Justin! Thank you for this plugin. How about giving an option to group users. Imagine creating an online assessment / questionnaire using gravity forms and only allowing a certain group of users the post or page. Right now i understand that you can restrict the content to roles like administrator or subscriber. Would be great if you can restrict it to a group that you can create and manage.
Hi Justin,
As everyone else has said, thanks for this awesome plugin! There’s just one feature that’s keeping me from implementing it across my sites, however, and it’s exactly what Vinny Troia asked for above: a redirect based on the user’s role.
I’m trying to make a Client Project Lightbox on one site, and an Advertisers’ Resource Center on another using Members. Best I can figure, I’ll have to use another plugin for the redirect and make a page full of conditionally accessible links.
Another plugin, s2Member, has this functionality but it’s DREADFULLY complex, and I love your plugin’s ease of use.
Alternatively or additionally, if I could make menu items appear based on a user’s role, that’d solve a lot of my problem, too. If you’d build the redirect or the conditional menu items into Members, I’d GLADLY pay for the plugin.
Please please please? Thanks!
Hi Justin, great plugin! I was wondering about the possibility of adding a couple hooks to it? I’m working on a plugin for WordPress Multisite that will keep the roles synced between sites. I have created a couple hooks in your plugin (running on my dev site), and it only adds 3 lines of code (all of which are do_action() calls). Hit me up from my email or my site for more information.
Thanks in advance,
Eric
I love this plug-in since I can have my editing team look at my pages without the general public seeing them.
HOWEVER – this plug-in stopped working one day and I don’t know how to fix it. Should I re-install it or deactivate and then activate?
Hi,
I wonder if there is any possibility to connect it to a coupon system?
I want the user to get a coupon and every time they post they need some coupons or credits. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Thank you so much for this excellent plug-in. It’s just what I was looking for.
An additional feature that I would LOVE to see is some way to secure uploads and files according to roles, not just the pages and posts. I’ve been struggling to find a way to set this up so that files in my uploads folder are not directly accessible to non-members, and where I can distinguish between registered members’ access levels. Not sure if this is something that can be addressed with a plugin, but if so I know that myself (and probably plenty of others) would gladly pay for an upgrade to that kind of functionality!
Thanks again for the amazing work on this plugin
The only feature I really want your plugin to have is the ability to assign multiple roles to users. Our website is a kind of digital agenda for parents who have their children in our school. Your members plugin helped me assign roles so as to prevent say parents for kindergarten from viewing the agenda for parents for eighth grade, for example.
The problem that we have is that some parents have children in multiple grades, but I can’t really assign multiple roles to a given parent so that he/she has access to the corresponding grades. That’s why I’m asking for this addition. I love the simplicity and ease-of-use of your plugin, and I’m looking forward to it’s progress.
Thanks,
Hideki
Multiple roles is definitely a feature that’s in the pipeline. I’ve just been patiently waiting for some proposed changes to the users screens in WordPress core to allow for this. It’s possible now, but there’s a whole lot of hoops to jump through to do something so simple.