PublishPress Capabilities – User Role Editor, Access Permissions, User Capabilities, Admin Menus vs Mandate App Security

PublishPress Capabilities is the access control plugin for WordPress. You can control all the capabilities and permissions on your WordPress site. We built this user role editor plugin so you have an easy and powerful way to manage user capabilities. You can use PublishPress Capabilities to manage all your WordPress user roles, from Administrators and Editors to Authors, Contributors, Subscribers and custom roles. Each user role can have the exact capabilities that your site needs. PublishPress Capabilities can clean up your post editing screen, admin area, and even the Profile screen. You can decide what authors see when they’re writing posts. You can hide any feature on the Gutenberg or Classic Editor screens. You can remove items in the WordPress dashboard and inside user accounts screens. The Pro version of PublishPress Capabilities has many extra features, including the ability to edit admin menu links, clean up the post editing screen, block admin pages by URL, and much more. PublishPress Capabilities Pro Upgrade to Capabilities Pro This plugin is the free version of PublishPress Capabilities. The Pro version of Capabilities has all the features you need to control permissions for your WordPress users. With Capabilities Pro you can manage access to posts, pages, media and custom post types. Click here to control access to your WordPress site with Capabilities Pro! The Key Features of PublishPress Capabilities Roles: You can edit, create, duplicate any WordPress user role. Capabilities: You can control all WordPress and plugin capabilities. Editor Features: You decide what users see when they’re writing posts in Gutenberg or the Classic Editor. Admin Features: You can remove items from the WordPress admin, toolbar, and even dashboard widgets. Admin Styles: Customize the admin area with your own branding. Admin Menus (Pro version): You can edit admin menu links and control who can access them. Profile Features: You can hide features for users in the “Profile” screen. Redirects: You can hide features for users in the “Profile” screen. Frontend Features: This feature allows you to modify the site’s frontend by hiding or adding CSS. Navigation Menus: You can restrict access to navigation menus by user role, or logged in status. User Testing: Safely test any user’s account without resetting their password. Admin Notices: Organize all the message and advertisements in your admin area. Roles PublishPress Capabilities gives you detailed control over all the permission levels on your WordPress site. You can edit user roles on your site, from Administrator and Editor to Contributor and Subscriber. With PublishPress Capabilities you can create or copy any existing WordPress user role. These roles can be customized in exactly the same way as the default WordPress roles. These new roles can be added to single sites or to an entire multisite network. Click here to see how to manage user roles. Capabilities With the Capabilities plugin, you can choose who can Publish, Read, Edit and Delete content. You can choose permissions for posts, pages, custom content types, categories, tags, and more. Click here to see how to manage capabilities. Many WordPress users have sites with custom post types. This can be done using custom code, a theme, or with a plugin. No matter how your post type is created, PublishPress Capabilities lets you enforce and assign distinct capabilities for your post type. PublishPress Capabilities enables you to add extra permissions to the taxonomies on your site. This feature includes the default Categories and Tags, but also applies to other taxonomies. For example, in WooCommerce you can apply custom permissions to Product categories, Product tags, and Product shipping classes. You can enforce and assign “Manage”, “Edit” and “Assign” distinct capabilities for all your taxonomies. Click here to learn about taxonomy permissions. Editor Features PublishPress Capabilities has an option called “Editor Features” allows you to clean up the post editing screen. You can decide what users see when they’re writing posts. You can hide anything on the Gutenberg or Classic Editor screens. You can hide boxes inside the sidebar such Tags, Categories, or Excerpt. You can the “Publish” button. You can even hide the post title, body, or permalink. This is a great alternative to plugins such as Adminimize. Click here to learn about hiding editor features. WordPress has a feature called “metaboxes”. This is a strange name, but you have seen them often if you use WordPress. When a user edits a post, the edit screen has several default boxes: Status & visibility, Featured image, Categories, Tags, etc. These boxes are metaboxes. Plugins can add also add their own metaboxes. The Pro version of the PublishPress Capabilities plugin allows you to hide metaboxes for specific user roles. Click here to learn about hiding metaboxes. Admin Features Admin Features allows you to hide items in the WordPress admin area and toolbar. You can decide what users see in your WordPress dashboard. You can use this option to hide all the links in the toolbar including “About WordPress”, “Visit Site” and more. You can also hide dashboard widgets such as “At a Glance”, “Quick Draft”, and “WordPress Events and News”. Click here to learn about removing toolbar items and dashboard widgets. Admin Styles The Admin Styles feature allows you to customize the WordPress admin area with your own branding. You can change the color scheme and visual features for the admin screens. It’s also possible to have different settings for different user roles. Click here to learn about customizing the admin area with your own branding.. Admin Menus (Pro version) With PublishPress Capabilities you can edit all your admin menu links. You can also restrict access to admin menu screens by user roles. This is useful because many plugin do not have any way to control who can access their admin screens. Click to see how to block Admin menu access. Profile Features “Profile Features” allows you to hide features in the “Profile” screen. You can decide what users see in their accounts. This “Profile” area is used as a dumping ground for the settings of many different plugins. Click here to learn about the Profile Features option. Redirects PublishPress Capabilities has a “Redirects” screen that allows you to control where users are sent before and after logging in to your site. There are four options available: * Login Redirect: Where users are sent when they log in. * Logout Redirect: Where users are sent when they log out. * Registration Redirect: Where users are sent when they register on your site. * First Login Redirect: Where users are sent when they log in to your site for the first time. Click to see how to redirect users. Frontend Features The “Frontend Features” screen allows you to modify the features that show on the frontend of your website. You can choose to hide IDs or classes, add CSS styles, or add body classes. All of these changes can be targeted to specific user roles. Click here to learn about frontend changes. Navigation Menu Restrictions PublishPress Capabilities enables you to restrict access to navigation menus by roles, logged in and logged out users. This is useful because a default WordPress site does not give you way to control the visibility of your links. Click to see how to block frontend menu access. User Testing / User Switching If you run a WordPress website which allows users to log in, you probably spend a lot of time answering account questions or solving website bugs for your users. Site administrators often have to browse their site and see exactly what the user sees. They need to test the user’s account without resetting their password. This is possible with PublishPress Capabilities. Click here to learn about user testing. Admin Notices This feature helps organize messages and advertisements in your WordPress admin area. It helps remove clutter from your WordPress experience. This feature will organize all these admin notices into a new area in the top-right corner of your screen. This “Admin Notices” area will show all the notices in a clean, organized area. Nothing is changed about the notices so you can deal with them as normal. The only difference is that you won’t be pestered by these notices on your main admin dashboard. Click here to learn about Admin Notices. PublishPress Capabilities is Safe to Use PublishPress Capabilities is completely safe to use. Every time you change your site’s permissions, this plugin will take a backup that you can restore if anything goes wrong. You can use these backups to migrate your roles and permissions from one site to another. This security feature is also very helpful if you want to test out changes on your site, or if you’ve installed a new plugin that has changed your site’s permissions. Every time you change your permissions, the PublishPress Capabilities plugin will now automatically create a backup. If you make a mistake, go to the “Backup” menu link and you’ll be able to roll back to a previous version. Click here to see how to backup permissions. Support for Media Library Permissions PublishPress Capabilities enables you to decide who can upload, edit and delete files from your site’s Media Library. By default, only Administrators are able to delete files in your Media Library. Subscribers and Contributors are not even allowed to upload files. You can customize these permissions for the Media Library and also the Featured Image box. Click here to learn about Media Library permissions. Support for WooCommerce Permissions We mentioned earlier that PublishPress Capabilities has special support for WooCommerce taxonomies. This is true for the rest of WooCommerce also. With PublishPress Capabilities you can control permissions for WooCommerce products, orders and coupons. Click here to learn about WooCommerce permissions. Support for WordPress Multisite PublishPress Capabilities allows you to control permissions on a single site or across your whole network. Every time you update permissions in PublishPress Capabilities, you can choose to sync those changes across your multisite network. Click here to learn about multisite permissions. Join PublishPress and get the Pro plugins The Pro versions of the PublishPress plugins are well worth your investment. The Pro versions have extra features and faster support. Click here to join PublishPress. Join PublishPress and you’ll get access to these Pro plugins: PublishPress Authors Pro allows you to add multiple authors and guest authors to WordPress posts. PublishPress Blocks Pro has everything you need to build professional websites with the WordPress block editor. PublishPress Capabilities Pro is the plugin to manage your WordPress user roles, permissions, and capabilities. PublishPress Checklists Pro enables you to define tasks that must be completed before content is published. PublishPress Future Pro is the plugin for scheduling changes to your posts. PublishPress Permissions Pro is the plugin for restricted content and advanced WordPress permissions. PublishPress Planner Pro is the plugin for managing and scheduling WordPress content. PublishPress Revisions Pro allows you to update your published pages with teamwork and precision. PublishPress Series Pro enables you to group content together into a series. PublishPress Shortlinks Pro allows you to create custom URLs for your posts and external links. PublishPress Statuses Pro enables you to create additional publishing steps for your posts. Together, these plugins are a suite of powerful publishing tools for WordPress. If you need to create a professional workflow in WordPress, with moderation, revisions, permissions and more… then you should try PublishPress. Bug Reports Bug reports for PublishPress Capabilities are welcomed in our repository on GitHub. Please note that GitHub is not a support forum, and that issues that aren’t properly qualified as bugs will be closed.

WordPress Application Passwords prove identity. They do not limit what an authenticated request can do. If the user behind a password is an admin, every tool that authenticates as that user has admin-level access — with no native way to narrow it. Today, REST clients, automation platforms, AI agents, management tools, and MCP connectors all authenticate with Application Passwords. Any of them, if misconfigured or compromised, can do anything that user can do. Mandate App Security adds the missing layer: a capability policy per Application Password. You define what each credential is allowed to do. Mandate App Security enforces it on every request. Normal wp-admin sessions and user roles are unaffected. Instead of treating every Application Password as equally trusted, Mandate App Security lets administrators and password owners save a capability allowlist per password. An administrator can choose: a WordPress user one of that user’s Application Passwords the capabilities that password should be allowed to use an optional expiration date for that password whether the scope is locked so the password owner can view it but not edit it Users can scope their own Application Passwords when WordPress allows Application Passwords for their account. Only administrators can edit another user’s scope or lock a scope against owner edits. When a request is authenticated with that Application Password, Mandate App Security checks the saved allowlist and removes capabilities that are not allowed for that password. Mandate App Security never grants new permissions. It only narrows an Application Password to capabilities the selected user already receives from assigned roles. If the selected Application Password is past its saved expiration date, Mandate App Security removes all capabilities for that request. Normal browser and wp-admin sessions for the same user are not changed. Example scopes A reporting dashboard that only needs to read posts and media should never be able to edit settings or manage users. A content automation tool that publishes posts has no reason to access WooCommerce orders. An AI writing assistant does not need plugin management access. With Mandate App Security, each of those tools gets a dedicated Application Password scoped to exactly what it needs. Nothing more. Source Code Mandate App Security is available at https://wpmandate.com. The public development repository, release packages, and build documentation are at https://github.com/FernleafSystems/Mandate-for-WordPress.