Question

I’m using WordPress to make my users make their own website/blog. I have a set up that I’m cloning out to all the users with some special user-roles and standard plugins.

However, some of the plugins are not supposed to be changed or inactivated by the users.

Is their any way to select which plugins different user roles are allowed to use? Or a easy way to hide some plugins in the plugins-page but still have them working as normal?

Maybe there’s some plugin that helps me to do this?

Answer 1

You could write a plugin that uses the “all_plugins” filter hook to remove from the array plugins that you don’t want displaying for a certain user. Something like this:

$plugin_credentials = array(
    'bob' => array(
            'Hello Dolly' => 1
    ),
    'jim' => array(
            'Akismet' => 1,
            'Hello Dolly' => 1,
    ),
    'admin' => "**ALL**"
);

function plugin_permissions($plugins)
{
        global $current_user, $plugin_credentials;

        $username = $current_user->user_login;

        if ($plugin_credentials[$username] == "**ALL**")
                return $plugins;

        $viewable_plugins = array();

        foreach ($plugins as $plugin) {
                if (isset($plugin_credentials[$username]) &&
                        isset($plugin_credentials[$username][$plugin['Name']]) &&
                        $plugin_credentials[$username][$plugin['Name']] == 1) {

                        array_push($viewable_plugins, $plugin);
                }
        }
        return $viewable_plugins;
}

add_filter('all_plugins', 'plugin_permissions');

Managing the user permissions in the plugin itself is not ideal, but it is probably easiest. You can expand on that idea to create admin pages for managing the users and their viewable plugins in a database table somewhere.