Hi, and thanks for your suggestion.
Unfortunately, there are reasons to have 3 roles.
Our plugin is used in multisite installations with hundreds of websites.
Network administrators reasonably want to be the only one who set sensitive plugin settings.
But maybe they want that admiistrators of each website in the network can add and delete more jobs. And maybe they want editors of each website can create jobs, but not delete them. And maybe authors of each website should be allowed to start jobs without being able to create or delete them… and so on.
There are many tasks that can be done with plugin, and to use one single capability for all of them won’t be enough for our user, and would be, probably, just wrong.
In theory, we could use a single capability and a filter that also passes the task to authorize, so developers could hook it and return true or false based on current user and given task, but:
- It would mean to apply a filter dozen of times in the plugin execution, which is slow
- Would make integration of our plugin much harder for users, expecially in complex and large multisite installation, where a lot of code would be needed
- Users who are not developers, would not be able to change defaults bacause not everyone is a keen to edit PHP code, this is why plugins exist, after all
- Would not be possible to create users for just backup purpose, which is something that many our users do
Considering that WordPress already provides a feature to create different capababilities for different tasks and to also assign a set of those capababilities at once to users, and considering that this feature (which is custom roles) is available for plugins, we just use it.
As final note, I want to say that custom roles are added on activation and removed on deactivation, so we ensure that our users installations are kept clean if they decide to don’t use the plugin anymore.
Have you experienced some negative impact on your website or on your user experience because of custom roles? If so, please let us know.
