Tell us what you are trying to do?
I am using a membership plugin to offer packages to subscribers. Packages assign a different role to the subscriber - for example: Elite, Premium, Standard. I want to sort posts that are submitted by the users - for example the sort order would be 1st Elite; 2nd Premium; 3rd Standard and so on. I prefer to have this set up so the sort by role is performed without the sort criteria being visible to the person that is querying the posts.
Is there any documentation that you are following?
I have reviewed several topics, but have not found one that fully addresses this problem. It seems as though if the current author role could be written to a custom field ("Author Role") for the posts that they have submitted, then the posts could be filtered by the Author Role custom field.
Are you aware of a solution with this or another method?
Unfortunately you won't be able to sort the posts based on the user roles. Posts views can only be sorted attributes of the posts such as custom fields, post date, post title etc.
The author's role information are attributes of the user.
Is it possible to create a custom field in the post, and then have the author role dynamically linked to this custom field?
It is possible to do this with the use of some custom coding.
What can happen is that when your user is creating the post on the frontend you can then set this field's value based on the users role.
For instance if your create a select dropdown with the values Elite, Premium, Standard where elite has a value of 1, premium 2 and standard 3.
Then when an elite user creates a post the code will automatically set the custom field to one. However as mentioned this will require some custom code to achieve.
I could see how this would work. However, once the post is submitted, the Author Role field is static - right? This would create a concern if the author role changes, for example if they downgrade or upgrade subscription.
Could the Author Role field be dynamic, so that it changes if the Author role changes. In one of the threads shared earlier, it seems like this was discussed, but it is a little above my skill level.
If such is the case if the user role is downgraded then there will need to be a hook that should retrieve all their posts and then update the value to what they're profile was downgraded to.
Unfortunately custom coding is the only solution here.
You can get in touch with a Toolset contractor at the link below to discuss any further options on this one. https://toolset.com/contractors/
