Previously, if we wanted to modify the roles and capabilities of end users, we would use one of the several plugin offerings. With the folding of roles into bbPress changing those capabilities and access, it seems as if our pervious granular control is now removed. I understand the reasons, and I’m also feeling quite hamstrung on my choices.

Previously I had two user levels that are similar to the updated Participant role. One allowed for addition and edits of publicly available forums. The second one allowed for not only publicly available forums, but also private ones as well. The new Participant role fills that latter role, but now I no longer have the user identity for the former role.

It appears that I can’t change the capabilities of the bundled roles, nor am I able to create new roles that will play nice with bbPress. What are my options around this? Will there be tools to add new roles or change the capabilities?

Thanks for any input.

[@aaclayton Participant 12 years ago]

I would like to weigh in here and agree with @xmasons sentiment. The “Members” plugin, for example, is a great example of role/capability management done right IMHO. I am unable, however, to modify the capabilities of the bundled bbp roles within the Members interface.

What I have been forced to do is create my own role for “forum moderator” with additional capabilities added on top of the bbp_moderator defaults. The resulting outcome is that I am deliberately not using the bundled bbPress role, which effectively defeats the purpose of having implemented it in the first place.

I’m not sure why the new bbp roles are incompatible with the Members plugin, I get the following error when attempting to modify their available caps.

Fatal error: Call to a member function has_cap() on a non-object in /home/tamrielfoundry/tamrielfoundry.com/wp-content/plugins/members/admin/role-edit.php on line 31

[@labsecrets Participant 12 years ago]

aaclayton, couple things:

1) Justin Tadlock just updated Members plugin to address the fatal error warning. Should work now.

2) If you have custom WP roles, we’ve found you can use Members plugin (Role Editor) to add the appropriate capability to an existing custom role. Participate and Spectate being the relevant capabilities for most visitors. This is how we gracefully merge WooCommerce (which has default role of “Customer”) with bbPress. We modify the Customer Role to add “participate” to it, so that anyone who visits site and purchases as a customer or registers free with WP (because we’ve set this as our our default role for WP under General/Settings) has the ability to post to bbPress.