PublishPress Capabilities 2.0, and 100,000 Users

PublishPress Capabilities is the plugin that gives you control over all the permissions on your WordPress site.

In the last few days, there have been two big milestones for the plugin:

1. Capabilities now has over 100,000 active installs of the Free version, according to WordPress.org.
2. We released Capabilities 2.0 with lots of new features for Free and Pro users.

Thanks to all of you who use PublishPress Capabilities. We do have big plans to make it even more useful for you.

In this post, I'll introduce all the new features in 2.0 for Free and Pro users. Scroll to the bottom, and you'll see a preview of extra goodies that will be coming soon.

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Free and Pro: The new Roles screen

PublishPress Capabilities 2.0 has a feature called “Roles”. This screen allows you to see all the user roles available on your site. You can also create new roles and delete any roles except for the default WordPress roles.

This is useful because WordPress doesn't give you a way to see all the roles on your site, or to add new roles.

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Free and Pro: Add users to multiple roles

In 2.0, you can now add multiple roles to one WordPress user. This post has an overview of all the details, but actually adding the roles is very straightforward. No configuration is needed.

This feature is useful because sometimes you need to give one user a combination of the permissions in two different roles.

• Go to the “Users” link in your WordPress admin menu.
• Either edit an existing users or create new user.
• The “Role” field will now be able to accept more than one choice:

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Pro: Restrict who can see admin menu links

The Pro version of PublishPress Capabilities 2.0 allows you to block access to admin menu links in WordPress. This is useful because many plugin do not have any way to control who can access their admin screens.

This feature allows you to remove access for a user role (you can't grant access to a menu link if a user role does not already have access).

In the image below, users in the “Author” role will not be able see or use any of the menu links marked in red.

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Pro: Restrict who can see frontend menu links

The Pro version of PublishPress Capabilities allows you to block access to frontend menu links in WordPress. This is useful because a default WordPress site does not give you way to control the visibility of your links.

This feature allows you to remove access for a user role. It does not to give access to a menu link if a user role does not already have access.

In the image below, users in the “Author” role will not be able see or use any of the menu links marked in red.

In addition to blocking access for user roles, you can also block access to menu links for all “Logged In Users” and all “Logged Out Users”. For example, in an image above there is a “Log out” menu link. You don't want to show that to visitors, so you block access for “Logged In Users”.

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What's next for PublishPress Capabilities?

We're working on at least two more cool new features for the Capabilities plugin. One will allow you to restrict who can see specific Gutenberg blocks. For example, if you have a “Join our site” promotional box, you can hide it from any users who are already logged in.

The other new feature will allow you to hide specific features on the post editing screen. You will be able to choose who sees all the small icons and options inside the editing screen. For example, you will be able to hide the “Update” and “Publish” buttons, or the “Categories” and “Tags” area.