How to change user roles in wordpress – User roles and capabilities
Believe it wordpress is completely flexible, using your coding skills you can quite customize your website in to anything you want. With a solid concept you can build your wordpress website in to a forum, directory, classifieds and even a social network. All that can be achieved by coding’s and plugins. OK let’s hub in to actual topic, wordpress roles and capabilities.
If you are planning or running your wordpress site as a multi author blog (membership) then you will allow users to register your site. WordPress has a well built in user management system where you can assign capabilities to your users. Administrator that is only you will have the ability to change and manage user roles and capabilities. Here let’s see how to change user roles in wordpress.
You can allow each user to perform various tasks in your site such as creating posts, editing posts, managing comments, managing other users etc. Whenever a new user registers your site, wordpress assigns them as a subscriber which is the default user role. WordPress has five pre-defined user roles such as author, administrator, editor, contributor and subscriber. Each user role has the ability to perform different tasks which we will discuss later in this article.
Related: How to change wordpress usernames
How to change user roles in wordpress – Assign capabilities to users
- Login to your wordpress site.
- Navigate to users link >> all users and select the user for whom you wish to change the role.
- Next to username drop-down the role and choose the appropriate role for that user.
- After selecting the role click on update user.
WordPress roles and capabilities
Administrator – This user will have full access to the entire site. He/she can add, edit and remove themes, posts, pages, plugins, users, categories, links, and options etc. Note that only Administrator can update wordpress and this is how the dashboard looks for administrator.
Editor – Editor can view, edit and remove his own post and other users post. Some of the capabilities for this role are publish, edit and delete pages, posts, published pages, posts of other users. Also editor can manage and moderate categories, links and comments.
Author – Users assigned with the role author can view, manage and add his own posts and media library. He/ she can read posts, comments, publish posts, edit and delete his own posts.
Contributor – This user can only view posts and comments. He or she can add (contribute) a new post, but cannot publish it. Administrators or editors need to review the post to publish it. Contributor can read, edit and delete his own posts.
Subscriber – He is just a subscriber. He / She can only manage his own profile.
No role for this site – One last option is the “no role for this site” which is useful for multisite that is used to mute a user. The user still exists, but when logging in to your site he/she will sees a message like this “you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page”.
Reference: – http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities
Hope this helped you on how to change user roles in wordpress and to understand the capabilities of different user roles. Share it and leave your comments below.