[wp-hackers] User roles - GSOC proposal

[Andrew Nacin]

I would read through http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10201. In a
nutshell, the consensus among the core developers is that the
roles/capabilities system was overdone initially, and that it should be
scaled back for performance and optimization purposes (more or less, scale
it back, so it can be scaled up). The core developers have committed to the
following: one user, one role (per blog). That would mean we remove two
hardly used aspects of the system: user-specific +/- capabilities, and
multiple roles per user.

I have not seen any indication that adding roles on a per-category/term
basis would be part of this, as the goal is to simplify the roles and
capabilities schema, not add a new layer of complexity. As a trade-off, you
would likely see basic role management become a part of core (perhaps more
likely as a core plugin, a concept that is newer than these discussions).

For what it's worth, the idea on http://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC2010 is a
copy-paste from the 2009 page, which was written before the conversations in
the summer of 2009 (see the IRC log in particular in #10201) and the
consensus and committments that followed.

I'm not saying it that category-level cannot be done (nor am I a GSoC
mentor, so I have no say over these projects).  I just know what the core
developers have previously committed to, and I also can't think of a way to
do it without a huge amount of overhead. Maybe with the right hooks, a
plugin could do it, I'm not sure.

Re wp_roles: Yes, a separate table has also been discussed as an option.
That debate has yet to be held, however.

Side note:

Another point where wp *still* makes use of the depr. User_level... when
> will we get rid of it anywhere?


User levels are not used anywhere in core. We support it for backwards
compatibility. (In 3.0, we also now emit a deprecated notice.)

Nacin