Top Five User Roles and Capabilities Plugins for WordPress

If you've read through our other articles on creating WordPress users and managing roles, you may be wondering if you can change some of the capabilities for a specific role or even create a new role and customize the capabilities for that role. The answer is yes. With the addition of a WordPress plugin, you can extend the basic WordPress user roles and capabilities.

We've done a bit of research into the various plugins available in order to compile a list of the top five WordPress plugins for extending and managing WordPress user roles and capabilities.

Members

With the Members plugin you can edit, create and even delete roles for your WordPress site. Additionally, you can create and delete capabilities and assign those new capabilities to any of your roles. Using this plugin you can set your entire WordPress site to be a private site.

User Access Manager

The User Access Manager plugin will allow you to create user groups and assign users to those groups. This plugin can be used to create a private section of your blog or even allow others to write Posts in certain areas of your blog.

s2Member® Framework

This plugin is primarily geared towards running a membership based site. It integrates with PayPal Website Payments Standard so you can create a fee-based membership site. The free version of this plugin allows up to four Membership Levels. With the unlimited custom capabilities you can create and assign, the s2Member® Framework plugin will allow you to create any number of membership packages. This plugin also allows you to control restrictions on downloadable content as well.

Role Scoper

The Role Scoper plugin allows you to assign roles and restrictions on individual Pages or Posts or even for an entire category. You can also set a time limit for read access or edit access you have granted. This plugin will not make any changes to the default WordPress roles, all alterations to user capabilities is content specific.

Advanced Access Manager

The Advanced Access Manager plugin describes itself as being most useful to more advanced WordPress users. If you are new to WordPress and just getting the hang of user roles and capabilities, take special care when using this plugin so you do not inadvertently lock out all of your users. This plugin will allow you to create new user roles and new capabilities. New capabilities can be assigned to either the default user roles or to a new user role you have created.

So, if you're looking to extend the user roles and capabilities for your WordPress site, you have quite a few options. You may want to test more than one of the plugins so you can decide which one is the best fit for your site. If you have any questions, feel free to submit a question in our Support Center.