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Members is a plugin that extends your control over your site. It’s a user, role, and capability management plugin that was created to make WordPress a more powerful CMS.

It puts you in control over permissions on your site by providing a user interface (UI) for WordPress’ powerful role and cap system, which is traditionally only available to developers who know how to code this by hand.

The relationship of users, roles, and capabilities

This is the most important thing to understand with this plugin. If you don’t understand this concept, you won’t understand what this plugin does. This is not a concept created by the plugin — this is how it’s done in WordPress.

Users are people who have registered on your site. In WordPress, users are assigned one or more roles. Roles define what a user can and can’t do.

Roles are a way of grouping users. Each user on your site will have at least one role. Roles are a set of capabilities. It is important to note that roles are not hierarchical. For example, “Administrator” is not higher than “Subscriber” in WordPress. You could literally give the Subscriber role more capabilities than the Administrator role. It’s very important that you grasp this concept.

Capabilities give meaning to roles. It’s a permissions system. They’re a way of saying a role can do something or a role can’t do something (e.g., Role A can edit_posts, Role B can’t activate_plugins, etc.).

How to use the plugin

Members includes all of its add-ons bundled in the plugin, but they’re off by default — so you only run what you actually need. To enable an add-on, go to Members → Add-Ons in your WordPress admin and click the Activate toggle on any add-on you want to use.

If you’re a developer, you can also check the page with a bunch of snippets.

Plugin Features

  • Roles: Edit, create, clone, and delete roles, as well as the capabilities assigned to them.
  • Multiple User Roles: Give one, two, or even more roles to any user.
  • Explicitly Deny Capabilities: Deny specific capabilities to specific user roles.
  • Content Permissions: Control which users (by role) have access to post content.
  • Shortcodes: Shortcodes to control who has access to content.
  • Widgets: A login form widget and users widget to show in your theme’s sidebars.
  • Private Site: Make your site and its feed completely private.
  • Administrator Rescue Link: Restore your Administrator access from the login page if you can no longer access WP Admin.
  • Reset Roles: One-click reset of the five default WordPress roles to their original capabilities from Members → Settings → Miscellaneous.
  • Import / Export Roles: Export roles (and optionally plugin settings) to a JSON file, and import them into another site with conflict detection and preview.

Add-ons

All add-ons below are bundled with Members and can be activated from Members → Add-Ons.

  • Members – Privacy Caps — Creates additional capabilities for control over WordPress’ privacy and personal data features (GDPR).
  • Members – Admin Access — Allows site administrators to control which users have access to the WordPress admin via role.
  • Members – Core Create Caps — Adds the create_posts and create_pages caps to posts/pages to separate them from their edit_* counterparts, providing more flexible editing capabilities.
  • Members – Category and Tag Caps — Creates custom capabilities for the core category and post tag taxonomies, giving precise control over who can manage, edit, delete, or assign categories and tags.
  • Members – Role Levels — Exposes the old user levels system, which fixes the WordPress author drop-down bug when users don’t have a role with one of the assigned levels.
  • Members – Role Hierarchy — Creates a hierarchical roles system.
  • Members – Block Permissions — Hide or show blocks in the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg).
  • Members – ACF Integration — Creates custom capabilities for the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin for managing with Members.
  • Members – EDD Integration — Integrates Easy Digital Downloads plugin capabilities into the Members roles system.
  • Members – GiveWP Integration — Integrates GiveWP and GiveWP Recurring Donations plugin capabilities into the Members roles system.
  • Members – Meta Box Integration — Integrates Meta Box plugin capabilities into the Members roles system.
  • Members – WooCommerce Integration — Integrates WooCommerce plugin capabilities into the Members roles system.