Roles and Capabilities in WordPress

One of the wonderful things about WordPress is the ability to have different levels of people all working on the web site. This is done by setting users with different levels of authorization. WordPress does this with a system that is actually quite generic. From a standard installation you get these roles:

  Admin
  Editor
  Author
  Contributor
  Subscriber

and of course non-logged in consumers of your website.

This system can be extended to many other authorization schemes, such as a Members Only Section, Paid Subscription Content, special subwebsites for individuals to create pages, different sets of people collaborating on content independent of one another.

These roles are actually made up of capabilities. So a subscriber role has capabilities of Can Read Posts and Can edit Profil. The following is chart of capabilities assigned to the standard roles.