Adding Custom Role-Based Access Control to Your Plugin
Posted on 20th June 2023
Adding Custom Role-Based Access Control to Your Plugin
As a WordPress plugin developer, you’re probably familiar with the basics of setting up role-based access control (RBAC) for your plugin. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to add custom RBAC to your plugin.
First, let’s review the basics of RBAC. RBAC is a security model that allows you to control who can access what resources in your WordPress site. Roles are used to group together users with similar permissions. For example, you might have a role for administrators, one for editors, and one for authors.
Each role has a set of capabilities, which are the permissions that role has. For example, the administrator role might have the ability to manage plugin settings, while the editor role might have the ability to manage plugin content.
When you’re setting up role-based access control for your plugin, you’ll need to decide which roles should have which capabilities. You can do this by adding a capability to a role using the add_cap() function. For example, if you want to give the administrator role the ability to manage plugin settings, you would use the following code:
add_cap( ‘administrator’, ‘manage_plugin_settings’ );
Once you’ve decided which roles should have which capabilities, you can use the has_cap() function to check if a user has a particular capability. For example, if you want to check if the current user has the ability to manage plugin settings, you would use the following code:
if ( current_user_can( ‘manage_plugin_settings’ ) ) {
// do something
}
Now that we’ve reviewed the basics of RBAC, let’s take a look at how to add custom RBAC to your plugin.
There are two ways to add custom RBAC to your plugin: using a capabilities map or using a roles and capabilities API.
Using a capabilities map is the simplest way to add custom RBAC to your plugin. A capabilities map is an array of capabilities and roles. Each capability in the map is associated with a role. For example, the following capabilities map would give the administrator and editor roles the ability to manage plugin settings, and give the author role the ability to manage plugin content:
$capabilities_map = array(
‘manage_plugin_settings’ => array( ‘administrator’, ‘editor’ ),
‘manage_plugin_content’ => array( ‘author’ ),
);
To use a capabilities map, you’ll need to register it with WordPress using the register_capabilities_map() function. For example, if your capabilities map is stored in a variable called $capabilities_map, you would use the following code to register it:
register_capabilities_map( $capabilities_map );
Once your map is registered, you can use the has_cap() function to check if a user has a particular capability. For example, if you want to check if the current user has the ability to manage plugin settings, you would use the following code:
if ( current_user_can( ‘manage_plugin_settings’ ) ) {
// do something
}
The other way to add custom RBAC to your plugin is to use the roles and capabilities API. The roles and capabilities API allows you to programmatically add capabilities to roles. For example, if you want to give the administrator role the ability to manage plugin settings, you would use the following code:
add_cap( ‘administrator’, ‘manage_plugin_settings’ );
Once you’ve added a capability to a role, you can use the has_cap() function to check if a user has that capability. For example, if you want to check if the current user has the ability to manage plugin settings, you would use the following code:
if ( current_user_can( ‘manage_plugin_settings’ ) ) {
// do something
}
Both the roles and capabilities API and the capabilities map approach have their own advantages and disadvantages. The roles and capabilities API is more flexible, but can be more difficult to use. The capabilities map approach is simpler, but is less flexible.
If you’re not sure which approach to use, we recommend starting with the roles and capabilities API. Once you’re comfortable with the API, you can switch to the capabilities map approach if you find it simpler to use.
The built-in access control system in WordPress is fairly limited, so you’ll need to add your own role-based access control to your plugin if you want to give your users different permissions.
One way to do this is to use the WP_User class. This class has a number of methods that you can use to check a user’s role and capabilities.
For example, you can use the WP_User::has_cap() method to check if a user has a certain capability. If you want to check if a user is an administrator, you can use the WP_User::is_admin() method.
You can also use the WP_User::has_role() method to check if a user has a certain role. This is useful if you want to restrict access to certain parts of your plugin to certain roles.
To get a list of all the roles and capabilities a user has, you can use the WP_User::get_role_caps() method.
Once you have checked a user’s role and capabilities, you can then use the WordPress conditional tags to restrict access to certain parts of your plugin.
For example, if you only want administrators to be able to access the settings page of your plugin, you can use the is_admin() conditional tag.
If you want to restrict access to a certain part of your plugin to certain roles, you can use the current_user_can() conditional tag.
You can also use these conditional tags to display different content to different users. For example, you could use the is_admin() conditional tag to display a message to administrators on the front end of your website.
Adding role-based access control to your plugin is a great way to improve the security of your plugin and to make sure that only the people who should have access to certain parts of your plugin do.
When you need to manage access to your plugin’s features and data, you can use roles and capabilities. By default, WordPress comes with six pre-defined roles: Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber. Each role has a different set of capabilities, which are permissions to perform certain tasks.
