Feature request – change plugin documentation

  • WordPress has grown phenomenally since it’s early days, and as we know it’s now used by many corporate and commercial sites, including larger multi-author publications.

    However, many plugin developers, while creating some truly wonderful and useful plugins, often forget that and assume that most of their plugin users are running single-author blogs. These plugins add menu items, settings pages, and occasionally buttons or modules to the Post Editor.

    This means that in a lot of cases, users who *should not* have access to such things do, and invariably they play around with things they shouldn’t play around with. I wish we could tell users “don’t touch that” and they wouldn’t but we all know that’s not feasible.

    I spend a LOT of time writing custom code to remove or hide these things, and often have to modify the code upon updates.

    SO my suggestion is to add to the documentation for Plugin Developers to ASK that they consider this, and consider adding a setting or option for site administrators to decide what is best for their site – visibility for menu items, settings, and modifications to the Post Editor should be based on user level (by role or capability) rather than for every user on plugin activation.

    I realize you can’t force plugin authors to comply, but if more of them would at least be aware of this issue, it would be a tremendous help to those who administer large multi-author websites.

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  • Are you aware of the User Role Editor plugin? It provides an easy interface where you can tick which capabilities each user role should have. While occasionally some plugins’ capabilities aren’t editable there, most are, and you don’t need to redo it after updates.

    Thread Starter TrishaM

    (@trisham)

    @doubleedesign

    Thank you for responding – I am actually familiar with that plugin and it’s a terrific plugin, but it adds a lot of very robust features (most of which we don’t need), and while it does allow *some* plugin management capabilities per user role, they only apply to activation/deactivation, settings, and menu items, not what buttons get registered or displayed to users in the post write/edit screen.

    Also, it really shouldn’t be necessary to add such a full-featured plugin just to modify a different plugin…….given that WP is now used in ways far beyond it’s earliest intentions, it behooves plugin developers to at least *consider* that some WP-based websites are NOT single-author blogs, and may not want all users to have access to the plugin’s features.

    Note: I edited this response because at first I thought you were responding to a different support request I made in the forum, to find a way to remove a button added by a plugin that we don’t want non-admins to have access to – I’ve been struggling with it and it occurred to me that I go through this way too often – plugin developers need to start keeping user roles in mind so I posted this feature request here too.

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