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Roles & Capabilities

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Roles & Capabilities

by Ariel

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Description

Roles & Capabilities empowers administrators with a complete toolset for managing user roles and capabilities directly from the WordPress admin — no code required.

Designed for simplicity and control, this plugin allows you to customize user permissions to fit any use case. Access is strictly limited to site administrators for maximum security; no additional capabilities can grant access to its features.

Key Features

  • Create and manage custom roles.
  • Edit role names and assign or remove capabilities.
  • Clone existing roles for faster setup.
  • Grant or revoke capabilities for individual users.
  • Create and assign new custom capabilities.
  • Remove user-defined capabilities when no longer needed.

Whether you’re building a membership site, managing editorial permissions, or fine-tuning access, this plugin gives you the precision and flexibility you need.

Development

This plugin is open-source and actively maintained.
👉 View or contribute to the source code on GitHub

  1. Upload the leira-roles folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
  3. Go to Users Roles or Users Capabilities to start managing permissions.
  1. New admin menus for managing roles & capabilities.

    New admin menus for managing roles & capabilities.

  2. "Capabilities" quick action on the user list page.

    "Capabilities" quick action on the user list page.

  3. Inline editing of user capabilities.

    Inline editing of user capabilities.

  4. Manage existing roles easily.

    Manage existing roles easily.

  5. Edit a role’s capabilities in seconds.

    Edit a role’s capabilities in seconds.

  6. Apply bulk actions from the user list.

    Apply bulk actions from the user list.

  7. Actions available in the role manager.

    Actions available in the role manager.

  8. Capabilities page with system protection warnings.

    Capabilities page with system protection warnings.

  9. Bulk capability editing interface.

    Bulk capability editing interface.

Can I create new user roles?

Yes! You can create new roles and assign the capabilities that best suit your needs.

Can I delete WordPress default roles?

No. Default roles are core to WordPress and cannot be removed for security and stability reasons.

Can I create a role with no capabilities?

Absolutely. Roles can be created without any capabilities assigned.

Can I create new capabilities to assign to roles?

Yes. The plugin lets you define and assign new custom capabilities.

Can I remove system capabilities?

No. Core capabilities are essential for WordPress to function correctly and are protected.

Simple and efficient

By dece2814 on October 31, 2025

I just needed to add the capabilities for specific users to edit the pages they own, which is not possible with the default Author role. This plugin made it really easy: I could clone the Author role into an "Author++" role with a bunch of additional capabilities and it was enough to let users edit their page, without giving them the much more powerful Editor role. Capabilities needed for this were:

  • edit_pages
  • edit_private_pages
  • edit_published_pages
  • publish_pages

Thank you a lot!

The best plugin for delete unwanted capabilities

By moisb on July 1, 2022

finally! Thank you so much for this! After testing several very complex and confusing user role plugins (which by the way just added more garbage to my wp_options table), I found "Roles & Capabilities". It was all I needed to get rid of more than half the weight of the option "wp_user_roles" in the table "wp_options" that slowed down my wp-admin.

Great & simple plugin

By dilszhan on February 13, 2021

keep up the good work. thank you so much for your hard work.

A hidden gem

By rehhoff on November 24, 2020

Coming from 'Members' which got bloated, this is just one of those hidden gems in the wordpress repository that is simple, clean bloatfree and just works. Keep it up. 🙂

At last! Great

By Carlos Vázquez (Carlos Vzquez) on May 11, 2020

I was not able to remove the capabilities installed by an old plugin, and they were many. I tried the best known role managers. After deallocating across all roles, they were also not removed. With this plugin, I finally got rid of them.

Amazing Plugin

By Juan Carlos Sanabria (sanabriajc) on January 3, 2020

Helps a lot

nicely done

By ivankiki on January 3, 2020

Great work!!

By jccs24 on January 3, 2020

Fantastic work, it will give you more control over access provided to your users

1.1.13

  • Fixed an issue with bulk deletion on the Capabilities list page.

1.1.12

  • Improve the build process to automatically update the plugin version.

1.1.11

  • Add a help icon to show the capability description.
  • Remove the deprecated “inlineEditL10n” variable.
  • “public” folder removed from the plugin.
  • Fixed issue saving capabilities in quick edit user capabilities.
  • Resolved “Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly” warning.
  • Confirmed compatibility with WordPress 6.8
  • Corrected several typos.
  • Implemented new local development environment.
  • Rebuilt using wp-scripts.

1.1.10

  • Confirmed compatibility with WordPress 6.6.
  • Fixed the security issue reported by Wordfence.
  • Improved input sanitization.
  • Properly escaped dynamic output.
  • Enhanced UI and fixed CSS layout issues.

1.1.9

  • Confirmed compatibility with WordPress 6.4.
  • Removed extra whitespace in the 5-star footer link.
  • Added the plugin GitHub link.
  • Aligned codebase with WordPress coding standards.
  • Cleaned up version control noise and enforced consistent line endings.

1.1.8

  • Confirmed compatibility with WordPress 5.9.

1.1.7

  • Confirmed compatibility with WordPress 5.7.

1.1.6

  • Confirmed compatibility with WordPress 5.6.

1.1.5

  • Fixed typo in a closing div tag.
  • Cleaned up typos in the readme.txt file.

1.1.4

  • Added GitHub Action for automated deployments.
  • Automated updates for readme.txt and assets.
  • Updated internal method documentation.

1.1.3

  • Added a “Rate Us” message to the admin footer.
  • Introduced cookie-based admin notifications.
  • Verified compatibility with WordPress 5.5.
  • Fixed several typos.

1.1.2

  • Fixed formatting of roles list column numbers.
  • Updated support link URL.
  • Improved CSS for inline edit checkboxes.

1.1.1

  • Added Spanish language support.

1.1.0

  • Major refactor of the plugin codebase.
  • Capabilities now appear immediately after creating or cloning a role.

1.0.2

  • Added banners and visuals to plugin assets.

1.0.1

  • Fixed role cloning bug.
  • Improved list table and capability sorting.
  • Added branding assets and banners for the plugin page.

1.0.0

  • Initial plugin release.
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