PublishPress Capabilities Supports Many More Plugins
We're excited to share some cool news about our most popular plugin, PublishPress Capabilities. This helpful tool gives you super-detailed control over who can do what on your WordPress site.
PublishPress Capabilities now shows you the capabilities for many free and commercial plugins, from Yoast and Rank Math to Learn Dash and Gravity Forms.
What problem is solved with this release?
Most role editor plugins promise to give you capabilities. But there is no simple way to find the capabilities for plugins. It's searching for a needle in a haystack to find out what they actually do.
We faced this limitation head-on and thought, “How can we make it easy for our users?” So, after trying out various approaches, we came up with the solution: our very own code scanner.
Imagine this code scanner as your plugin detective. It digs into any WordPress plugin, unveils its hidden permissions, and voila! We present it to you in PublishPress Capabilities, neatly laid out for your convenience. No more mystery plugin permissions, just straightforward control for your WordPress site.
Thanks to the new code scanner, this week's release of PublishPress Capabilities has support for dozens of plugins.
What plugins are now supported?
We've long supported important plugins such as WooCommerce. Here are the new plugins supported in this release:
BetterDocs, GravityView, Gravity Forms, NextGEN Gallery, BackWPup, Forminator, LearnDash, MailPoet, Fluent Forms, All in One SEO, Smash Balloon, Site Kit by Google, Wordfence, Yoast Duplicate Post, Smart Slider, Loco Translate, Rank Math SEO, Query Monitor, Strong Testimonials, Download Monitor, Yoast SEO, Formidable Forms, GiveWP, BuddyPress, bbPress, and Sunshine Photo Cart.
How to use these new capabilities
Start by installing PublishPress Capabilities on a site with other popular plugins. Now go to the “Capabilities” screen.
In this first screenshot below, you can see the capabilities for Yoast SEO. These four capabilities are explained in the official Yoast documentation.
Rank Math SEO is another popular plugin that is now supported in PublishPress Capabilities. The official Rank Math documentation doesn't exactly explain each capability, but does give you a good general overview. Rank Math has over twenty different capabilities.
However, most plugins don't provide any documentation for their capabilities, which is why we think this feature will be so useful. In this next screenshot, you can see the Google Site Kit plugin. There is no documentation for this plugin, but our code scanner was able to extract the capabilities.
This screenshot below shows the capabilities for the All in One SEO plugin. These restrict access to the plugin's main screens.
Next, we see the capabilities for the Formidable Forms plugin. These control who can change the plugin settings, plus who can modify forms and form entries.
Next, we see the capabilities for the Wordfence plugin. These control access to the main Wordfence settings and who can enable Two-Factor Authentication for users.
This screenshow below shows capabilities for the Sunshine Photo Cart plugin. This is an eCommerce plugin, so the access control allows users to manage products and orders.
And here's one more example of a free plugin from WordPress: the Strong Testimonials plugin. These capabilities grant access to some of the main settings' area.
It's easy to run this scanner on free plugins from WordPress.org because we have access to the code. However, we've also tried to add support for some popular commercial plugins. I'll give a shout out to the Gravity Forms team whose documentation is first class.
What's next with the new plugin capabilities?
We have big plans for expanding this feature in PublishPress Capabilities. There really is nothing else like it in WordPress, and it's something that's much needed.
What's next? We need your help:
- WordPress users: Let us know which plugins you want us to support. We manually verify the scanner results for each plugin, so we'll add support for more plugins in the next PublishPress Capabilities release.
- WordPress developers: Let us know if you have any documentation on your plugin's capabilities. We'll be happy to support your plugin and link to your documentation.