Description
Members is a roles and capabilities based WordPress membership plugin. It gives your users the ultimate member experience by giving you powerful tools to add roles and capabilities and assign them to your users.
Members allows you to set permissions to restrict content on your site by providing a simple user interface (UI) for WordPress’ powerful roles and capabilities system, which has traditionally only been available to developers who know how to code this by hand.
Plugin Features
- Role Editor: Allows you to edit, create, and delete roles as well as capabilities for these roles.
- Multiple User Roles: Give one, two, or even more roles to any user.
- Explicitly Deny Capabilities: Deny specific capabilities to specific user roles.
- Clone Roles: Build a new role by cloning an existing role.
- Content Permissions / Restricted Content: Protect content to determine which users (by role) have access to post content.
- Shortcodes: Shortcodes to control who has access to content.
- Widgets: A login form widget and users widget to show in your theme’s sidebars.
- Private Site: You can make your site and its feed completely private if you want.
- Administrator Rescue (Magic Link): If you lose access to the WordPress admin (e.g. after editing roles), you can request a secure, time-limited link by email to restore your Administrator role and Members capabilities—no support ticket or database access required.
- Plugin Integration: Members is highly recommended by other WordPress developers. Many existing plugins integrate their custom roles and capabilities directly into it.
Seamless MemberPress Integration
If you’re looking to build a business out of your membership site by creating paid memberships there’s no better way than to use MemberPress. Members and MemberPress work together to provide the ultimate member experience and will help you start and profit from your amazing WordPress membership sites!
All Add-ons are now included
Members now includes ALL of it’s add-ons completely free of charge! Here are some of the awesome features they add to Members:
- Block Permissions: Allows site owners to hide or show blocks based on user logged-in status, user role, or capability.
- Privacy Caps: Creates additional capabilities for control over WordPress’ privacy and personal data features (GDPR).
- Admin Access: Allows site administrators to control which users have access to the WordPress admin via role.
- Core Create Caps: Adds the create_posts and create_pages caps to posts/pages to separate them from their edit_* counterparts, providing more flexible editing capabilities.
- Categories and Tag Caps: The Category and Tag Caps add-on creates custom capabilities for the core category and post tag taxonomies. This allows site owners to have precise control over who can manage, edit, delete, or assign categories/tags.
- Role Levels: Exposes the old user levels system, which fixes the WordPress author drop-down bug when users don’t have a role with one of the assigned levels.
- Role Hierarchy: Creates a hierarchical roles system.
- ACF Integration: Creates custom capabilities for the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin for managing with the Members plugin.
- EDD Integration: Integrates the Easy Digital Downloads plugin capabilities into the Members plugin’s role manager.
- GiveWP Integration: Integrates the GiveWP and GiveWP Recurring Donations plugin capabilities into the Members plugin’s role manager.
- Meta Box Integration: Integrates the Meta Box plugin capabilities into the Members plugin’s role manager.
- WooCommerce Integration: Integrates the WooCommerce plugin capabilities into the Members plugin’s role manager.
For more info, visit the Members plugin home page.
Like this plugin?
The Members plugin is a massive project with 1,000s of lines of code to maintain. A major update can take weeks or months of work. We don’t make any money directly from this plugin while other, similar plugins charge substantial fees to even download them or get updates. Please consider helping the cause by:
Documentation
Support
If you need plugin support from us, you can visit our support page.
Plugin Development
If you’re a theme author, plugin author, or just a code hobbyist, you can follow the development of this plugin on it’s GitHub repository.
Screenshots
Role management screen 
Edit role screen 
Content permissions meta box (edit post/page screen) 
Plugin settings screen 
Select multiple roles per user (edit user screen)
Installation
- Upload
membersto the/wp-content/plugins/directory. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
- Go to “Settings > Members” to select which settings you’d like to use.
More detailed instructions are included in the plugin’s readme.html file.
FAQ
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Why was this plugin created?
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We weren’t satisfied with the current user, role, and permissions plugins available. Yes, some of them are good, but nothing fit what we had in mind perfectly. Some offered few features. Some worked completely outside of the WordPress APIs. Others lacked the GPL license.
So, we just built something we actually enjoyed using.
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What’s the difference between Members and MemberPress?
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Members and MemberPress solve different problems and are designed to work together.
Members is a free roles and capabilities plugin. It gives you a UI on top of WordPress’ native roles and capabilities system so you can create and edit roles, assign multiple roles to users, and restrict content by role or capability. It’s the right tool when you need to control who can do what inside your site—dashboard access, content permissions, and capability management—without charging for access.
MemberPress is a premium, all-in-one WordPress membership platform built for monetization and much more. In addition to paid subscriptions, payment processing (Stripe, PayPal, and more), recurring billing, coupons, and drip content, MemberPress also includes:
- Courses — a built-in LMS for creating and selling online courses with lessons, quizzes, and progress tracking.
- CoachKit — tools for running coaching programs, including milestones, habits, and client check-ins.
- Community Groups — private member communities and discussion spaces tied to your memberships.
- Member Profiles & Directories — customizable front-end profiles and searchable member directories.
- Email marketing integrations, affiliate program support, and many more premium features.
It’s the right tool when you need to sell access to content, courses, coaching, or communities—and grow a full membership business around it.
The two plugins are complementary, not competing. Many sites use Members for fine-grained role and capability management alongside MemberPress for everything membership-business related. For a full side-by-side comparison, see Members vs MemberPress.
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How do I use it?
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Most things should be fairly straightforward, but you can also view the docs online.
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Minimum PHP requirements.
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Members now requires PHP 7.4+
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I can’t access the “Role Manager” features.
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When the plugin is first activated, it runs a script that sets specific capabilities to the “Administrator” role on your site that grants you access to this feature. So, you must be logged in with the administrator account to access the role manager.
If, for some reason, you do have the administrator role and the role manager is still inaccessible to you, deactivate the plugin. Then, reactivate it.
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On multisite, why can’t administrators manage roles?
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If you have a multisite installation, only Super Admins can create, edit, and delete roles by default. This is a security measure to make sure that you absolutely trust sub-site admins to make these types of changes to roles. If you’re certain you want to allow this, add the Create Roles (
create_roles), Edit Roles (edit_roles), and/or Delete Roles (delete_roles) capabilities to the role on each sub-site where you want to allow this. -
How do I use Administrator Rescue (Magic Link) if I’m locked out?
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If you can no longer access the WordPress admin (for example, after changing your role or capabilities), you can restore your Administrator access yourself:
- Go to your site’s login page:
yoursite.com/wp-login.php - In the address bar, add
?action=members_rescueso the URL is:yoursite.com/wp-login.php?action=members_rescue - Enter the email address of an account that has (or had) the built-in Administrator role, or is a Super Admin (multisite).
- Click “Send Rescue Link”. If that account is eligible, a secure link will be sent to that email (you may need to check spam).
- Open the link from the email within 15 minutes. Your Administrator role and Members capabilities will be restored, and you’ll be redirected to the login page to sign in.
Only users with the built-in WordPress “Administrator” role (or Super Admins on multisite) can use this feature; custom or cloned roles are not eligible. The link expires after 15 minutes and is limited to a few attempts per IP to prevent abuse.
- Go to your site’s login page:
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Help! I’ve locked myself out of my site!
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Please read the documentation for the plugin before actually using it, especially a plugin that controls permissions for your site. We cannot stress this enough. This is a powerful plugin that allows you to make direct changes to roles and capabilities in the database.
If you have the built-in Administrator role (or are a Super Admin on multisite) but lost access to the admin (e.g. after editing roles), try the Administrator Rescue (Magic Link) first: go to
yoursite.com/wp-login.php?action=members_rescue, enter your admin email, and use the link we send you to restore access.If that doesn’t apply or didn’t work, stop by our support forums to see if we can help. Your web host may also be able to restore your site from a recent backup, but we only recommend that as a last resort, as it could mean losing work or members added since the backup.
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“Members – Membership & User Role Editor Plugin” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Members – Membership & User Role Editor Plugin” has been translated into 21 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Members – Membership & User Role Editor Plugin” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
3.2.21
- Fixed: Privacy Caps add-on not granting privacy capabilities to administrators on fresh activations
- Removed: Legacy standalone-plugin code from bundled add-ons (dead activation hooks, obsolete build scripts, orphaned readme/uninstall files)
3.2.20
- Added: Reset roles
- Added: Add rescue link for Administrator roles only
- Changed: Refreshed branding with updated WordPress.org banner and icon assets, header SVG, and logo
- Changed: Updated About page design
- Changed: Optimized role user count retrieval using transients for improved performance
- Fixed: Missing header banner on some admin pages
- Removed: Bundled POT file (translations now delivered via WordPress.org language packs)
3.2.19
- Fixed: Added support for WF 2FA error messages
- Fixed: Missing “you are already logged in” string
- Fixed: Add-on page RTL CSS fix
- Fixed: Block permissions fixes
- Fixed: Fix redirect_to issue on shortcode
- Fixed: Other minor bugfixes
3.2.18
- Fixed: Add-on activate toggle display issue on narrow screens
- Fixed: Login error redirection
- Fixed: Outdated Login form styling
- Fixed: Allow changing display name for some Roles
3.2.17
- Added: Bulk select/unselect checkboxes on Role capabilities
3.2.16
- Fixed: Protected posts being forced-hidden from API search even if setting was off
3.2.15
- Added: Growth Tools menu item
- Fixed: Translation errors
- Fixed: Styles and formatting on add-ons and about pages
3.2.14
- Fixed: Error in REST API calls when posts results not an array
3.2.12
- Fixed: Cleaned up prior author name and links
- Fixed: Cleaned up broken or incorrect links
- Fixed: Removed some unnecessary files
- Fixed: Incorrect gettext calls
- Fixed: Removed unneeded load_plugin_textdomain calls
- Fixed: Updated POT translation file
3.2.11
- Fixed: Translation warnings after WP 6.7
- Fixed: Add option to hide protected content from REST API searches
- Fixed: Add support for Loco Translate plugin (via new loco.xml file)
3.2.10
- Fixed: Capability checks on AJAX calls
- Fixed: PHP warning for $wp_embed
- Changed: Now requires PHP 7.4 minimum
3.2.9
- Fixed: PHP 8.1 deprecation notice on ACF integration (props @DSGND)
3.2.8
- Added: members_wp_roles filter to WP roles in Content Permission box
- Fixed: Content Permission icon in Panel block
- Fixed: Position of Field Group menu item in ACF
3.2.6-7
- Fixed: PHP 8+ compatibility
- Added: members_show_roles_page_cap filter for edit_roles_cap
- Fixed: Improperly named variable
3.2.5
- Fixed: WP Cron task for in-plugin notifications running unnecessarily
3.2.4
- Fixed: More package deployment fixes
3.2.3
- Added: Footer with helpful links
- Fixed: Package files deployed unnecessarily
- Fixed: Debug warnings
- Fixed: Correct bootstrap file required
3.2.2
- Fixed: Undefined index notice
3.2.1
- Fixed: Uncaught TypeError: in_array()
3.2.0
- Added: Members Notifications
- Changed: Converted
jQuery.fn.click()(deprecated) tojQuery.fn.on('click') - Changed: Replaced references to Affiliate Royale with Easy Affiliate
- Changed: WP Tested Up To version (5.9)
3.1.7
- Fixed: Hierarchical roles missing settings
- Changed: Refactored checks for whether MemberPress is active; added
members_is_memberpress_active() - Changed: “Paid Memberships” section of Content Permissions meta box should not show when MemberPress is active
- Changed: Wording from “Upgrade to MemberPress” to “Add MemberPress”
3.1.6
- Added: “Miscellaneous” settings section
- Added: “Disable Review Prompt” setting to permanently remove the review prompt
- Added:
MEMBERS_DISABLE_REVIEW_PROMPTconstant to permanently remove the review prompt - Changed: WP Tested Up To version (5.8)
- Fixed: Using transients for review prompt caused the prompt to persist when dismissed; switched to using options instead
- Fixed: Users widget not working in new block-based widgets editor
3.1.5
- Fixed: Block permissions not working for nested blocks (e.g. columns)
3.1.4
- Changed: Converted instance of wp.editor to wp.blockEditor
- Changed: Check for MemberPress constant instead of using
is_plugin_active() - Fixed: Compatibility for PHP 8
3.1.3
- Changed: Disabled Content Permissions side meta box
- Fixed: Issue with comma-separated roles that include spaces
3.1.2
- Fixed: Review prompt should only show to admins
3.1.1
- Changed: Admin UI cleanup
3.1.0
- Changed: Admin UI
- Fixed: Issue with custom capabilities not saving to custom roles
3.0.10
- Fixed: Users who can promote should be able to assign roles to their own account
3.0.9
- Fixed: ACF integration trying to bump priority on ACF menu
3.0.8
- Fixed: Settings page error
3.0.7
- Fixed: Issues related to translated admin menu slug
3.0.6
- Fixed: Settings page throwing error on non-English sites
3.0.5
- Fixed: Collapse Permissions block editor section by default
3.0.4
- Added: Filter for applying custom validation to settings
- Fixed: Inaccessible settings page in Admin Access
3.0.3
- Changed: Display icons using file_get_contents() instead of include() to prevent executing them as PHP
- Fixed: PHP warnings being thrown
- Fixed: Make sure admin menu is always accessible
3.0.2
- Fixed: Minimized SVG icons to fix issues with parsing them
3.0.1
- Fixed: Some JS and image files weren’t checked in via SVN; bumped version to add them
3.0
- Added: Rolled all add-ons into core
- Changed: Consolidated all Members-related settings under one admin menu item
- Changed: Made login and user widgets enabled by default, and removed settings