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 groups 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 Profile. The following is chart of capabilities assigned to the standard roles.
| Capability | Admin | Editor | Author | Contributor | Subscriber |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add/Edit/Delete Plugins | X | ||||
| Add/Edit/Delete Users | X | ||||
| Add/Edit/Delete Themes | X | ||||
| Import/Export | X | ||||
| Install Updates | X | ||||
| Manage Comments | X | X | |||
| Manage Categories/Tags | X | X | |||
| Manage Links | X | X | |||
| Edit Any Post/Page | X | X | |||
| Publish/Delete Any Post/Page | X | X | |||
| Read/Edit Private Post/Page | X | X | |||
| Edit Own Published Posts | X | X | X | ||
| Upload files | X | X | X | ||
| Publish Posts | X | X | X | ||
| Delete Own Posts | X | X | X | ||
| Edit Draft Posts | X | X | X | X | |
| Delete Draft Posts | X | X | X | X | |
| Read Public Posts/Pages | X | X | X | X | X |
