Use display name of roles?

Email Users simply uses the value (name) of the role that is returned by the WP_Role API. If you have defined roles that don’t appear in the list of roles, that is a problem that I would need to look into but if you have renamed the WordPress roles to something else, I am not sure how you have done that.

As for the translation aspect, I have given that some thought and it does make sense so I added the translation wrapper around the value used on the page so if a translation for ‘Admininstrator’ exists, you should see it as part of the “Role -” listing.

I have a beta release of the next version available if you’d like to test it out.

I use in functions.php

$wp_roles->roles['editor']['name'] = 'Customer Account';
    $wp_roles->role_names['editor'] = 'Customer Account';

to rename the roles in the backend.

In WPs Profile Settings, for example, I see my custom name in the popup menu.

But in Email users I still see Role - Editor.

You’re mucking with the builtin WordPress roles which I don’t think is a good idea. I am retrieving the information via the WordPress API where as you’re modifying the values directly.

I would recommend doing something like this:

add_action('init', 'addCustomerAccountRole');

function addCustomerAccountRole()
{
    global $wp_roles;
    if ( ! isset( $wp_roles ) )
        $wp_roles = new WP_Roles();

    $ca = $wp_roles->get_role('editor');
    //Adding a 'customer_account' with all editor caps
    $wp_roles->add_role('customer_account', 'Customer Account ', $ca->capabilities);
}

This will add a new role to your site called “Customer Account” which has all the same capabilities as the Editor role. If you do this, you will see the “Customer Account” role (as long as there are users assigned to the role) as one of the role choices when using the Email Users Notify or Send Group Message functionality.

Thanks for the great answer, Mike. I will consider this.

But what I wanted to achieve is to keep WP as lightweight and clean as possible, so I did not add another role.
I just did change a name intended for display, not coding use. These names are translated by WP anyway, so using the names that WP gives would be a better approach in my opinion.

If you would use these nice names instead of the internal role names (what WP itself does), you wouldn’t have to mind the translation of these as a bonus, because they would be correct for anybody using another language version than English.

What you are doing is modifying the value of the global $wp_roles as WordPress loads your theme. The change you are making is not persistent, it isn’t stored anywhere in the database.

Email Users doesn’t see your change because it isn’t persistent. What Email Users does is query the database for the defined roles using the WordPress API and uses the information WordPress returns to construct the selection box.

This is the actual code:

function mailusers_get_roles( $exclude_id='', $meta_filter = '') {
	$roles = array();

	$wp_roles = new WP_Roles();
	foreach ($wp_roles->get_names() as $key => $value) {
		$users_in_role = mailusers_get_recipients_from_roles(array($key), $exclude_id, $meta_filter);
		if (!empty($users_in_role)) {
			$roles[$key] = $value;
        }
	}

	return $roles;
}

Because I am using a new instance of WP_Roles as opposed to looking at the $wp_roles global, Email Users will never see your changes.

Unless you want to change how you are defining your custom role, I don’t see a good solution to your request as I am not going to change the code from using the API to examine the $wp_roles global variable.

With respect to translation, I think it would actually work correctly if the role is defined correctly and a translations exists for it. I would have to test it to be sure and I don’t really have an easy way to do that.

Thanks for your detailed answer, Mike.

I will think about how to tackle this problem, and your explanations helped a lot!