Aram Zucker-Scharff

I’m releasing a new WordPress plugin today that allows you to use shortcodes to embed comments and comment threads into the body of stories. It’s called Response Stack. The goal is to build stories out of comments and help both the original story and the discussion around it live on. You can see the first […]

PressForward, the Google Reader replacement that runs inside your WordPress install, is now in open beta! This is one of the project’s that I’ve spent the last year working on and I’m very excited to get to this stage. PressForward, which is hitting beta just in time to complete testing when Google Reader hits the […]

PressForward Plugin Beta Now Available:

PressForward, the Google Reader replacement that runs inside your WordPress install, is now in open beta! This is one of the project’s that I’ve spent the last year working on and I’m very excited to get to this stage. 

PressForward, which is hitting beta just in time to complete testing by the time Google Reader hits the off button, is a totally open source tool built to run inside WordPress with no extra requirements, server modifications, or messing about in the command line. The system has been built as both an RSS reader and an editorial tool, allowing groups to look at feeds together, discuss them, and nominate them for consideration as part of an aggregation process. 

Here’s a fresh ZIP file of our latest beta version, ready for upload and testing in your WordPress install. 

Here’s the issue forum to report all the bugs you encounter, so that we can fix them.

Give it a try and tell me how it goes!

The PressForward Plugin was developed for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University by Aram Zucker-Scharff, Boone B. Gorges, and Jeremy Boggs. It is free to use and modify under a GNU GPL2 license.

So, earlier today I discovered that there is not an easy way to allow users to control user access to various parts of the back end. As far as I can tell, the functions just don’t exist in the core and the two parts WordPress cares about.

The problem is that WordPress controls access to its various components (and to any developer-added components) using capabilities. The capability system is pretty cool, but in order to make it as customizable as possible, they are not tied to specific user roles. 

This sounds like a good idea, until you want to create a way for a site’s administrators to give specific user roles the ability to access (or not access) parts of a site or plugin. 

Your average user has no interest in checking the user/capability chart every time they want to switch a user’s access. It would be ridiculous to ask them to do so. But just setting up an option for administrators to select user levels is useless to me as a developer, because all the actual functionality resides in setting capabilities matched to things like menus. 

So, I need to be able to do a few things in order to make the two ends meet here. 

1. I need to be able to find out what the user level is based on the capability. 
2. I need to be able to identify a capability that ‘defines’ a user role, that  being one that a user role can do, but that no lower user roles can do. 

So, to do all that, I set up three functions.

The first allows you to get just a list of capabilities, with each capability having an array of the user roles that can use it. As an added bonus, it will also allow you to get just a specific capability and its array. 

The second allows you to get a role by capability. There are two approaches here, you can get the lowest role or the highest role for any capability. I set the function to be able to do both (plugins and themes can create capabilities that do not propagate up, I think), but by default, it will get the lowest possible user role for the capability parameter. 

The third allows you to find that ‘defining’ capability for a user role. By sending the role slug, it will walk through the list until it finds the first capability where the lowest level role is the parameter role. You can then use that capability to set the user level throughout your plugin/theme and then use it to build a set of setting checkboxes or a select where the roles are displayed, but the values are the defining capabilities. 

As far as I could tell, WordPress doesn’t have anything set up to do this yet. So here’s the code.