WordPress Role & Capabilities

Posted October 9, 2013

One of the many valuable features offered by WordPress CMS is the possibility to share with others the management of your site. As a matter of fact, WordPress identifies various roles and capabilities that can be shared by a team of people thus allowing them to contribute to the daily life of the site. In other words, WordPress uses these roles to give you the site owner, the ability to control what selected “users” can and cannot do within the site. Various tasks and levels of responsibility are available: writing, editing posts, creating Pages, defining links, creating categories, moderating comments, and of course for the Super Administrator, the management of plugins, layout themes and much more!

There are six pre-defined roles: Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. Each role can perform a defined series of tasks also known as Capabilities. A default set of capabilities is pre-assigned to each role, but other capabilities can be assigned or removed using specific functions such as add_cap() and remove_cap(). Also, new roles can be added or deleted using the add_role() and remove_role() functions.

Think about it, this is one CMS platform that offers the most sophisticated features right outside the box. And whatever comes standard with WordPress is free. You will only pay for its installation and its customization if you need a custom layout and design or more features such as eCommerce, existing database content import….etc.