The current system for handling member roles and capabilities employed by the Wordpress platform is more than adequate for the casual user, in a lot of cases, it’s probably more than they need.
If you’re hosting a personal blog, with a few hundred subscribers, there’s not often much worry about being able to assign groups of people certain permissions and capabilities in order to manage your site; in fact, you may be the only one who has ever laid eyes on your dashboard, and therefore this system is completely moot.
What if you run something more than a personal blog, however?
Maybe you run a site the likes of ProBlogger Blog Tips, All Things Digital, or ChickSpeak? Larger sites with more than one administrator, a group of authors, editors and other staff that work together to make things tick. Then you might find that the current system can be very restrictive in your ability to assign responsibilities.
It looks like Justin Tadlock has taken it upon himself to address this issue for the community at large.
He first mentioned the idea of developing a new plugin to handle this necessity back on July 22nd, and it garnered a lot of support and interest. Since then he’s gone forward with development, and two days ago (yes, I know I’m slow) has released the first beta for testing.
This is a component based plugin (use what you need, ignore the rest), and it’s looking like it’s shaping up to be extremely useful. If you’re interested in helping him out to test the plugin, find bugs and suggest new features that would benefit the community, please take a look.
In related news, it appears the developers of Wordpress may be interested in doing some revamping of the roles and capabilities system as well. I would suggest, if you’re interested, to get involved in the beta testing of Justin’s plugin now — the work is progressing very fast, and considering the convergence of interests, might easily be considered for integration into the Wordpress core itself.
See the rest of Justin’s blog here.
