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Members is a plugin that extends your control over your blog. It’s a user, role, and capability management plugin that was created to make WordPress a more powerful CMS.

It puts you in control over permissions on your site by providing a user interface (UI) for WordPress’ powerful role and cap system, which is traditionally only available to developers who know how to code this by hand.

The relationship of users, roles, and capabilities

This is the most important thing to understand with this plugin. It’s so important that we highly recommend reading this tutorial: Users, roles, and capabilities in WordPress. If you don’t understand this concept, you won’t understand what this plugin does. This is not a concept created by the plugin. This is how it’s done in WordPress.

We highly recommend reading that blog post, but here’s the short version:

  • Users are people that have registered on your site. I’m sure you already knew that. In WordPress, users are assigned a specific role. This role defines what the user can/can’t do.
  • Roles are a way of grouping users. Each user on your site will have a specific role. Roles are a set of capabilities. It is important to note that roles are not hierarchical. For example, “Administrator” is not higher than “Subscriber” in WordPress. You could literally give the Subscriber role more capabilities than the Administrator role. It’s very important that you grasp this concept.
  • Capabilities give meaning to roles. It’s a permissions system. They’re a way of saying a role can do something or a role can’t do something (e.g., Role A can edit_posts, Role B can’t activate_plugins, etc.).

How to use the plugin

This plugin is set up to have a components-based system. The reason for this is that we don’t want to stick everyone with a bunch of features they don’t need. There’s no point in using the Role Manager feature if all you need is just a login widget and some shortcodes. So, it’s a use-only-what-you-want system.

To activate certain features, look for the “Members” link under your “Settings” menu while in your WordPress admin. When on the new page, you’ll be able to select the features you want to use.

We recommend at least activating Role Manager feature. It is at the heart of this plugin, and many other features will likely require its use in some form.

Plugin Features

  • Role Manager: Allows you to edit, create, and delete roles as well as capabilities for these roles.
  • Multiple User Roles: Give one, two, or even more roles to any user.
  • Explicitly Deny Capabilities: Deny specific caps to specific user roles.
  • Clone Roles: Build a new role by cloning an existing role.
  • Content Permissions: Gives you control over which users (by role) have access to post content.
  • Shortcodes: Shortcodes to control who has access to content.
  • Widgets: A login form widget and users widget to show in your theme’s sidebars.
  • Private Site: You can make your site and its feed completely private if you want.

If you are developer, you can also check the page with a bunch of snippets.

Add-ons

  • Privacy Caps – Creates additional capabilities for control over WordPress’ privacy and personal data features (GDPR).
  • Admin Access – Allows site administrators to control which users have access to the WordPress admin via role.
  • Core Create Caps – Adds the create_posts and create_pages caps to posts/pages to separate them from their edit_* counterparts, providing more flexible editing capabilities.
  • Category and Tag Caps – The Category and Tag Caps add-on creates custom capabilities for the core category and post tag taxonomies. This allows site owners to have precise control over who can manage, edit, delete, or assign categories/tags.
  • Role Levels – Exposes the old user levels system, which fixes the WordPress author drop-down bug when users don’t have a role with one of the assigned levels.
  • Role Hierarchy – Add-on plugin for Members, which creates a hierarchical roles system.
  • Block Permissions – Hide or show blocks in the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg).
  • ACF Integration – The Members – ACF Integration add-on creates custom capabilities for the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin for managing with the Members plugin.
  • EDD Integration – The Members – EDD Integration add-on more nicely integrates the Easy Digital Downloads plugin capabilities into the Members plugin’s role manager.
  • GiveWP Integration – The Members – GiveWP Integration add-on more nicely integrates the GiveWP and GiveWP Recurring Donations plugin capabilities into the Members plugin’s role manager.
  • Meta Box Integration – The Members – Meta Box Integration add-on more nicely integrates the Meta Box plugin capabilities into the Members plugin’s role manager.
  • WooCommerce Integration – The Members – WooCommerce Integration add-on more nicely integrates the WooCommerce plugin capabilities into the Members plugin’s role manager.