Category Access 0.4.0 Released
I’ve released Category Access 0.4.0. This plugin allows the blog maintainer to restrict access to posts belonging to particular categories on a user-by-user basis.
This plugin was previously called “Category Limit”, but I’ve renamed it to reflect its new WordPress 2.0 compatibility. (Control is no longer based on user levels.) The plugin may still work with WordPress 1.5.2–please report your experiences.
Download it on my code page.
February 7th, 2006 at 10:35 am
Great plugin and works as described! However I think it would make more sense (and be more in line with WP2.0’s new role scheme) to define category access based on roles rather than per user. If you have a lot of users it would really take some time to fine tune each user’s settings. Since roles define different groups of users anyway (and is also extensible with the role manager plugin), basing access on roles would simplify the whole assignment/management process.
February 7th, 2006 at 11:14 am
How exactly do you envision roles working? Would you create a new role for each combination of category viewing permissions? (That would be a lot of roles!) Also, is there a role editor in the management interface?
Also, even after creating roles, you would still need to set the role for each user. I’m not sure I see how this helps make things easier.
February 8th, 2006 at 3:45 am
Every user must have a role assigned upon account creation. I guess the thing would be that you’d want to have your category/role permissions set up so when a user account is created by default they have access to categories that make sense for their role. My thinking is that this should be what most people want to do anyway, and the number of different roles would be a much smaller set to manage than individual users.
I do see where it might be useful to be able to finetune user access, but I guess I’m just asking for a way to set not only a default access level in general (for all users), but also for each role.
Role manager plugin for wordpress: http://redalt.com/wiki/Role+Manager
February 8th, 2006 at 10:35 am
Well, since users create accounts for themselves, I have to set a default that applies to all new users. (I don’t want to let them choose their own roles!) What I could add is a mapping from role to category permission set. e.g. the “Family” role has permission to see all categories including “Baby”. Then in the user edit page, you can choose to set a role or modify the categories directly as it is now.
Ideally these roles would be additive, so that you can have the “Family” role as well as the “Company” role, so that the administrator doesn’t have to create a “Family+Business” role.
How does that sound? I think this would end up looking like user groups, where a user can be a member of multiple groups…