Sure add 5 of your own user roles… but what about 5000 or 5 million…
How many combinations of capabilities might you actually imagine?
I suspect hardware might be a limitation there.
Will these be dealt with in the database with no issue or will it cause performance issues or worse?
Records would still be accessed, processed, instanced and so on, but at some point it could begin taking days just to reorder them.
My opinion is that you should add a few thousand user roles to a WordPress site and let us know how it impacts performance.
Thanks for taking the time to reply peeps. @leejosepho yes you are probably right. I was not thinking of variations of capabilities particularly. I was thinking of it as a bit of a design hack. I could create 10 different user roles and then let only specific user roles view specific front end content on the site. I wondered how wordpress would cope if this method scaled into what would essential be a membership site.
@diondesigns I am considering it 😉
The big question is what will each one of these user roles need to do differently to every other user role that you create?
If you have different permisisons for every user (that’s enough of an admin nightmare by itself) then that number of roles might be justified. If you just want to have a different role with the same permissions for every user, there’s no point in doing that at all. Anything that you need ot check can be done on the username or email address instead of worrying about having too many roles set up.
I’m sure that you have a reason behind your idea, so I’d be very curious as to what you want this to actually achieve?
@catacaustic
Essentially a specific group of users ie. subscribers can only see the posts of a specific writer/editor and no one else.
I wouldn’t do this using WordPress permissions. If I was trying to achieve this, I’d set up my own relationship table in the database and record which users have access to which authors. That way it’s very clearly defined, doesn’t complicate anything that’s currently built in, and can be pretty easily managed – without needing 1,000’s or 1,000,000’s or new roles added. It also helps that you can assign that a user is allowed to view multiple authors, so it’s a lot more expandable for the future and allows a lot more flexibility.
Very well said. Good points!
