[wp-hackers] Capabilities as a taxonomy

[Moya, Eddie]

On 1/23/10 4:03 PM, "Mike Schinkel" <mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:

> Not allowing multiple roles to a single user could lead to a maintenance
> nightmare for admins those sites that don't want to have to duplicate the
> capabilities for a role in every combination with other roles, i.e. e+w, e+cm,
> e+w+cm, etc.

I don't see how having all those combinations with no simple way of making
changes to only e+w's but not e+cm's would be less of a nightmare. You would
in essence have to create alternate versions of each roll for every special
case - e(a)+w and e(b)+cm. Havoc ensues.

I see what you mean though, if you have a truck load of unique users that
don't belong to specific groups then you might not want to have 100
different rolls created. Furthermore you might want to change all editing
behavior across the board which would, for arguments sake, be easier if you
could refer to all editor related behavior across the board as with e+w
e+cm, etc. However I would say if you are trying to change the editing
behavior of all users then you need to be able to change the capabilities
themselves, which is a flexibility wordpress currently lack imho - the
previously suggested taxonomic system might be an additional way of helping
to solve such problem. If we are going to do multi-roll system, we might as
well do away with rolls and assign capabilities directly to users one by
one.

It seems like perhaps whats being grasped for here, is a way to bundle
subsets of caps "sub-rolls" if you will. Whatever a user does is a user's
roll, and their "roll" in wordpress should reflect that.

As I said before, it may be a matter of simply allowing developers as much
flexibility as possible so they can develop powerful plugins so I'm not
entirely opposed to it, however I just don't see a case for how this really
simplifies the every day tasks of managing users.