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Multiple Roles

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Multiple Roles

by Christian Neumann

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Description

This plugin allows you to select multiple roles for a user – something that WordPress already supports “under the hood”, but doesn’t provide a user interface for.

User edit and Add new user screens will display a checklist of roles instead of the default role dropdown. The main user list screen will also display all roles a user has.

It also supports well Multisite mode.

That’s it. No extra settings.

If you want to contribute to this plugin, feel free to check the Github repository : https://github.com/chrneumann/multiple-roles

Automatic Install

  1. Log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Plugins → Add New
  2. Search for “Multiple Roles”
  3. Click “Install Now” under the Multiple Roles plugin
  4. Click “Activate Now”

Manual Install

  1. Download the plugin from the download button on this page
  2. Unzip the file, and upload the resulting multiple-roles folder to your /wp-content/plugins directory
  3. Log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Plugins
  4. Click “Activate” under the Multiple Roles plugin
  1. The roles checklist on Edit User screens

    The roles checklist on Edit User screens

  2. The Users screen with the enhanced Roles column

    The Users screen with the enhanced Roles column

Who can edit users roles?

Anyone with the promote_users capability. By default, that means only administrators and network administrators on multi-site.

Can you edit your own roles?

If you’re a network administrator on a multi-site setup, yes, you can edit your roles in sites of that network. Otherwise, no. This is how WordPress works normally too.

I’m on the user edit screen – where’s the checklist of roles?

It’s underneath the default profile stuff, under the heading “Permissions”. If you still can’t find it, you might be on your own profile page, or you might not have the promote_users capability.

Can you remove all roles from a user?

Sure. The user will still be able to log in and out, but won’t be able to access any admin screens or see private pages. However, the user will still be able to see the WP Toolbar by default, which displays links to the Dashboard and Profile screens, so clicking on those will result in seeing a permission error.

It is Simple and Does the Job

By Dennis Bareis (dbareis) on July 31, 2025

Not much to say, does exactly what is says

SIMPLE AND WORKS

By multmediadesigns on November 28, 2023

Simple and to the point. Did exactly what I needed.

Elegant, simple .. great plugin

By thomasprice61 on July 7, 2020

Elegant and simple .. a great plugin

Cleanest way to assign multiple roles

By Old account (Dargus) on July 1, 2020

Thank you for this plugin, this is the cleanest interface to add multiple roles that I've seen. The popular User Role Editor plugin should take this as an example of good UX.

Works perfectly every time

By Monique (oddsheep) on May 18, 2018

Great plugin. Used on multiple sites now and it works perfectly every time

Performance Degradation

By ssheward on May 4, 2018

Installed this on my 4.9.5 site and performance was severely degraded. This was the first thing I disabled in order to troubleshoot and it was like night and day. Recommend finding an alternate solution unless this issue is addressed.

Simple, does what it says on the box

By Ahrengot on October 5, 2017

Browsed through the source code too. Everything looks good code-wise as well.

Excellent

By inspired888 on October 3, 2017

In my opinion, it's a major oversight for WP to not provide this interface by default. What a ridiculous limitation to have only one role per user. As you say, the underlying feature exists, but WP does not make it accessible. This plug-in does a great job of fixing that oversight. Thanks.

AMAZING plugin!!!

By dviolante on September 28, 2017

Works PERFECT this plugin, this must be in WP core! Thanks for developing this beautiful plugin.

Simple and Clean

By erilame8 on September 28, 2017

Amazing plugin! Very simple to use. Thanks for building this. I was looking for a plugin to initially restrict content by groups but the group aspect of the plugin i'm currently using is a paid feature but the restrict-by-user role is free. So i managed to create a new user role (same as subscriber) and then used this plugin to assign users to it! Kinda like creating a new group. Thanks so much.

1.3.6 / 1.3.7

  • 1st june 2022
  • SECURITY FIX: Validate that the user is allowed to change selected roles

1.3.5

  • 27th may 2022
  • Test the plugin against WordPress 6.0
  • Fix open issues with sanitizing text

1.3.4

  • 25th may 2022
  • Add new plugin maintainer: cneumann

1.3.2

  • 30th june 2021
  • Test the plugin against WordPress 5.7
  • Fix the use of nonce for two functions

1.3.1

  • 1st july 2020
  • Test the plugin against WordPress 5.4
  • Fix an issue when the user role could be lost because of a wrong check in the backend

1.3.0

  • 12 april 2018
  • Use ‘promote_users’ cap instead of ‘edit_users’
  • Fixed bug preventing us from unsetting a user’s roles
  • Only remove get_editable_roles() roles on update
  • Thanks to thomasfw for the contributions

1.2.0

  • 21 august 2017
  • Check compatibilty with WP 4.8.1
  • Translation of roles names : thanks to Benjamin Niess
  • Mutlisite enhancement : Use a WP 4.8 filter to easier edit signup user meta

1.1.4

  • 23 december 2016
  • Fix fatal error in new user in single site : After adding an user, a wp_die error was shown “You can’t give users that role”, it was due to changes in 1.1.2
  • Workaround to handle multisite support without breaking single site features

1.1.3

  • 22 december 2016
  • Fix fatal error in user update : After updating an user, a wp_die error was shown “You can’t give users that role”, it was due to changes in 1.1.2

1.1.2

  • 21 december 2016
  • Fix bug in multisite : After adding a new user with email confirmation, the multiple roles were not set, so the user did not have any roles on the site

1.1.1

  • 3 november 2016
  • Remove PHP closure to ensure Backward Compatibility with PHP versions < 5.3

1.1

  • 24 october 2016
  • New maintainer : Florian TIAR, you’re strongly encouraged to update this plugin
  • Add support of role checkbox in new user form (admin)
  • Add Multisite support (for new user form)
  • Add i18n support (text domain, translatable strings and pot file)
  • Add some hooks (actions and filters)
  • Fix issue where some low level users could add admin users
  • Sanitize and escape all data
  • Enhance UX of the form

1.0

  • 2015
  • Initial release
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