A few days ago, Justin Tadlock put a link out on Twitter to a screenshot of a plugin he was developing that dealt with user management. Apparently, this type of plugin is in high demand and due to the amount of interest he’s received, he is going ahead with development but he needs our help.
The goal of this plugin is to be a complete management system for users, roles, and permissions. I want it to fit in with your administration panel and feel like it has always been there. It needs to work completely within the bounds of WordPress too. I’ve seen some plugins that don’t take advantage of WordPress’s roles and capabilities system.
The plugin will be developed in a BuddyPress like fashion where it will be made up of a number of different components, each which can be turned on or off by the site administrator. Think of it as a use only what you need type of system.
On the heels of this announcement by Justin Tadlock, the most recent WordPress developers chat featured an agenda item that dealt specifically with the roles and capabilities system in WordPress. You can read what was discussed in that chat here. The proposed system has me questioning whether Justin should be waiting for the new system to come into play or if he should continue on the track that he’s on.
This is great news. One of the chief issues with WordPress that causes me to fall back on using Drupal with some clients is the user management bottleneck WordPress currently has.
I used to also have issues with WordPress feeling limited with content types (only pages/posts) but the PODS plugin has solved that issue for me. (Man, I love messing around with the functionality of PODS now. Shortcode for pods is like my new rapid-prototyping layout tool.) And now with Justin’s work, this could be the start of me offering the majority of my clients a WordPress site.