Tag Archives: capabilities

06.10.10
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Exploring Roles and Capabilities

I’ve had a request from my team, the MacDolphins, to be able to send e-mail to the parents of specific age groups.  We do a number of activities that are limited to older kids or only for a specific age group so I’ve been aware of this need for a while.  Unfortunately I don’t have an easy way to solve it.

I think the WordPress Roles and Capabilities functionality may be the answer to my problem.  I could create a role for each age group and assign the users that have a swimmer in that age group to the appropriate roles.  By doing this, I think I can continue to use the Email Users plugin to contact specific groups of users based on the roles defined.

I need to do more research on Roles and Capabilities.  I’ve played with a couple plugins and they aren’t real straight forward.

04.01.09
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Roles and Capabilities for wp-SwimTeam

WordPress has a built in set of Roles and Capabilities.  The wp-SwimTeam plugin makes use of these standard roles and capabilities to allow certain actions to be performed.  At least it is supposed to.  It turns out that when I redesigned the menus to take advantage of the 2.7 Dashboard, I restricted access to all of the menus except the end user capability to users with Administrator privileges.

This is a mistake and this morning I committed a change which will rectify the problem.  The way it is supposed to work is as follows:

  • Subscriber – access to the “Swim Team” end user menu and capability.
  • Author – Subscriber capability plus access to the Report Generators.
  • Editor – Author capability plus access to the Manage menu and capability.
  • Administrator – Author capability plus access to the Options menu.

In theory the Options menu contains items which should be set once and by in large, left alone.  The Management menu contains the items which require regular interaction from one or more users who coordinate the Swim Team.