Changing roles’ capabilities

If you need to change one or two capabilities, it’s relatively easy to do so with a few lines of code in a plugin or your theme functions file. For example, if we wanted to allow any logged-in user to view our private posts and pages, we would need to grant them two additional capabilities.

<?php
// allow subscribers to view private posts and pages
$PrivateRole = get_role('subscriber');
$PrivateRole -> add_cap('read_private_pages');
$PrivateRole -> add_cap('read_private_posts');
?>

The first line fetches the existing subscriber role (as an object) and assigns to it a variable. In the next two lines, we add the capabilities to read private posts and pages to our variable. That’s it! Any subscribers can now read your private content — and so can authors and contributors, whose roles include all the capabilities of subscribers. (Remember that editors and administrators already had these particular capabilities.)

Adding capabilities by hand, one at a time, will be a pain if you need to make a lot of changes. If that’s the case, I recommend Justin Tadlock’s Members plugin, which provides an elegant user interface for modifying roles, and also includes some great features for managing content permissions.