The “Contributor” role is one of the default user roles in WordPress, alongside “Subscriber”, “Author”, “Editor” and “Administrator”.
Contributors are close to the bottom of the permissions ladder in WordPress. They have very few permissions. This role is designed to allow people to write content for your site, but they do not have permission to publish without approval.
Here’s a rundown of what Contributors can do on a default WordPress site:
We had a question this week from a PublishPress customer who wanted to understand the relationship between authors and their WordPress posts. They wanted to know if authors could see – or perhaps even manage – comments on other people's posts.
This tutorial is a guide to understanding the control that users have over comments on posts they have written. You can also follow this link if you want a guide to moderating comments in WordPress.
The moderate_comments capability is one of the more confusing permissions in WordPress. It controls who can manage and post comments on your site.
I know many of you want to control who can manage or post comments on your site, so in this guide I'll explain how this capability works. You may also find it helpful to read our guide to authors managing comments on their own posts.
Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress world. However, it is a fairly basic plugin that lacks some key features such as access control.
In this guide, I'll show you how to control access to Contact Form 7 features. We'll use the PublishPress Capabilities plugin. If you want to take this tutorial a step further, check out how to control access to Contact Form 7 admin menus.
Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular WordPress plugins ever, with over 5 million installs.
Contact Form 7 is so popular that even it's add-ons can have 100,000's of users. Click here for our guide to Contact Form 7 permissions and there's also a guide to controlling access to Contact Form 7 admin menus.
Flamingo is a plugin which stores messages submitted through Contact Form 7. Flamingo was written by Takayuki Miyoshi, who also developed Contact Form 7.
We had an interesting question from a PublishPress user this week:
I am trying to allow a some user role to choose an existing Tag, but not allow them to create new Tags. This was simple enough to do with Categories, but I cannot figure it out for Tags.
This was a great question that requires some explanation. We recommend the TaxoPress plugin for managing your tags, but PublishPress plugins can handle these more complex permissions.
WordPress sites display an admin toolbar for all logged-in users. This is visible on the frontend of your site and also in the WordPress admin area.
This toolbar contains shortcuts to key features in WordPress. A user in the Subscriber role will only see a few features. A user in the Administrator role may see a very busy toolbar, particularly on a site with many plugins.
In this blog post, we'll give you an introduction to what users in different roles may see in the admin toolbar. If you want to hide the admin toolbar for users, follow this guide.
Many of us spend a lot of time working on our content. We spend hours making sure the spelling, grammar, punctuation are as good as possible.
So we are worried about losing content. What happens if my browser crashes? What happens if someone edits my post and makes a mistake?
Fortunately, WordPress has the solution: Revisions.
The PublishPress Capabilities plugin has a feature that allows you to select a “Role Level”.
Each user role in WordPress has a different level from 0 to 10. This screenshot is from the PublishPress Capabilities screen:
“Private” is one of eight post statuses available in WordPress. These statuses control whether WordPress posts are visible to the entire world, waiting for moderation, or sent to the trash to await deletion.
When you write in WordPress, you will most commonly see the Draft, Pending Review and Publish statuses.
The Private status is used less frequently, but it can be useful in some situations. Private posts are for content that you only want high-level users to see. These posts are most useful for internal communication and documentation. I would not recommend storing top-secret information in these posts, but rather want to hide content from regular users.
This week, one PublishPress user asked us about an interesting WordPress problem.
They could not see the Author option when they were writing posts. This is how the Author dropdown normally appears: