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WordPress uses a concept of Roles, designed to give the blog owner the ability to control and assign what users can and cannot do in the blog. A blog owner can manage and allow access to such functions as writing and editing posts, creating Pages, defining links, creating categories, moderating comments, managing plugins, managing themes, and managing other users. The tool that gives the blog owner this control is the ability to assign a Role to a user.
WordPress has five pre-defined Roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. Each Role is allowed to perform a set of tasks called Capabilities. There are many Capabilities including publish_posts, moderate_comments, and edit_users. The default Capabilities are pre-assigned to each Role.
The Administrator Role is allowed to perform all possible Capabilities. Each of the other Roles has a decreasing number of allowed Capabilities. For instance, the Subscriber Role has just the read Capability. One particular Role should not be considered to be senior to another Role. Rather, consider that Roles define the user's responsibilities within the blog.
The WordPress Plugin API allows Roles and Capabilities to be added, removed and changed. Since Plugins might change Roles and Capabilities, just the default ones are addressed in this article.
Upon installing WordPress, an Administrator account with all Capabilities is automatically created.
The default role for new users can be set from the Settings General SubPanel.
A Role defines the set of tasks a user is allowed to perform. For instance, the role of Administrator encompasses every possible task that can be performed within a WordPress blog. On the other hand, the Author role allows the execution of just a small subset of tasks.
The following sections list the default Roles and their Capabilities:
The documentation needs to be updated to incorporate Multisite, and super admin.
All these capabilities are exclusive to the administrator role.
Multisite Super Admins have, by default, all capabilities. The following Multisite-only capabilities are therefore only available to Super Admins:
Single site admins are, in effect, Super Admins, and as such, are the only ones to have access to additional admin capabilities.
The capabilities of Administrators differs between single site and Multisite installations. All administrators have the following capabilities:
Only Administrators of single site installations have the following capabilities. In Multisite, only the Super Admin has these abilities:
| Capability | Super Admin | Administrator | Editor | Author | Contributor | Subscriber |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| manage_network | Y | |||||
| manage_sites | Y | |||||
| manage_network_users | Y | |||||
| manage_network_themes | Y | |||||
| manage_network_options | Y | |||||
| unfiltered_html | Y | |||||
| activate_plugins | Y | Y | ||||
| add_users | Y | Y | ||||
| create_users | Y | Y | ||||
| delete_plugins | Y | Y | ||||
| delete_themes | Y | Y | ||||
| delete_users | Y | Y | ||||
| edit_files | Y | Y | ||||
| edit_plugins | Y | Y | ||||
| edit_theme_options | Y | Y | ||||
| edit_themes | Y | Y | ||||
| edit_users | Y | Y | ||||
| export | Y | Y | ||||
| import | Y | Y | ||||
| install_plugins | Y | Y | ||||
| install_themes | Y | Y | ||||
| list_users | Y | Y | ||||
| manage_options | Y | Y | ||||
| promote_users | Y | Y | ||||
| remove_users | Y | Y | ||||
| switch_themes | Y | Y | ||||
| unfiltered_upload | Y | Y | ||||
| update_core | Y | Y | ||||
| update_plugins | Y | Y | ||||
| update_themes | Y | Y | ||||
| edit_dashboard | Y | Y | ||||
| moderate_comments | Y | Y | Y | |||
| manage_categories | Y | Y | Y | |||
| manage_links | Y | Y | Y | |||
| unfiltered_html | Y | Y | Y | |||
| edit_others_posts | Y | Y | Y | |||
| edit_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| edit_others_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| edit_published_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| publish_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| delete_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| delete_others_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| delete_published_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| delete_others_posts | Y | Y | Y | |||
| delete_private_posts | Y | Y | Y | |||
| edit_private_posts | Y | Y | Y | |||
| read_private_posts | Y | Y | Y | |||
| delete_private_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| edit_private_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| read_private_pages | Y | Y | Y | |||
| edit_published_posts | Y | Y | Y | Y | ||
| upload_files | Y | Y | Y | Y | ||
| publish_posts | Y | Y | Y | Y | ||
| delete_published_posts | Y | Y | Y | Y | ||
| edit_posts | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | |
| delete_posts | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | |
| read | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Capability | Super Admin | Administrator | Editor | Author | Contributor | Subscriber |
Prior to version 2.0, WordPress used a user User Levels system. This was replaced in version 2.0 with the much improved and more extensible Roles and Capabilities system you see today. To maintain backwards compatibility with plugins that still use the user levels system (although this is very much discouraged), the default Roles in WordPress also include Capabilities that correspond to these levels. User Levels were finally deprecated in version 3.0.
| Capability | Administrator | Editor | Author | Contributor | Subscriber |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| level_10 | |||||
| level_9 | |||||
| level_8 | |||||
| level_7 | |||||
| level_6 | |||||
| level_5 | |||||
| level_4 | |||||
| level_3 | |||||
| level_2 | |||||
| level_1 | |||||
| level_0 |
