New guide for controlling WooCommerce capabilities with Access plugin

   Amir

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February 9, 2014
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We use WooCommerce to power the e-commerce section of our sites. Our team includes different users, each with unique needs for admin access. Access 1.2, which was released a few days ago, let’s us carefully control what each of our team members can do on the site.

To skip ahead, you can just straight to the WooCommerce roles and capabilities guide.

Access 1.2 allows to create custom roles and control their capabilities in the WordPress admin. Until this version, every team member had to get an administrator account, to perform different tasks. This works, but is not the best arrangement for security and site administration.

Now that Access lets us control the different capabilities, we were able to craft custom roles, each granting the exact privileges that each team member really needs. This way, people can safely do their job, without running the risk of accidentally breaking things.

Our custom roles include:

Role Purpose Privileges
Customer support To handle client problems, including accessing their purchase information and editing it. Manage orders
Finance To produce reports which go to the CPA. View reports
Content author To edit WordPress pages and posts, as well as WooCommerce products.

Access allows to create these custom roles, set their ‘level’ (the historic way WordPress determines privileges) and set capabilities manually.

It also lets us control what content types different roles can edit, publish and even read. Since our textual content is all public, we don’t use the read access setting. However, we do follow a publishing workflow, so we use different roles for editing and publishing content.

To create your own custom WooCommerce roles and capabilities, you are invited to read the complete manual page on custom WooCommerce roles and admin capabilities. Happy admin management!