You may have read my previous article about how I set up a web site for a private club with three levels of user access by using Peter’s Login Redirect, WP Hide Dashboard, Role Manager, and New User Email Setup plugins.

I’ve since discovered the User Access Manager plugin, which allows you to create user groups and give them access rights to selected posts and/or pages. You can even assign separate admin and user permissions within the group. Great for project sharing regardless of whether your WordPress site is public, private, or a mixture of the two.

Older versions of this plugin came with this warning:

“If you activate the plugin your upload dir will protect by a ‘.htaccess’ with a random password and all old downloads insert in a previous post/page will not work anymore. You have to update your posts/pages.”

The latest version of the plugin allows you to unlock these files so that they don’t appear broken. It also allows you to delete the .htaccess files if you should decide to deactivate the plugin. If you are using this plugin, make sure you have the latest version.

This plugin may be able to replace Role Manager, especially if all you want to do is control read access to posts and pages. Keep in mind that if you uninstall Role Manager your roles & capabilities will be left however you last set them. They will not be returned to default. At the moment there is some discussion among WordPress developers (including myself) about the possibility that modifying the default user roles causes conflicts with other plugins that use the Role feature (like Profiler and WordPress Users, both of which do not seem to work for people who have used Role Manager). We’ll see if either of the plugin authors can come up with a fix that takes modified roles into account.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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