How do I create custom user roles?

Hi, this is Sandra from GREYD. Today I’d like to show you how to use the User Management in GREYD.SUITE with which you can create custom user roles with very specific custom capabilities and for example have content on your website that is only visible and/or editable by very specific user roles.

So let’s have a look. We’re here in the GREYD.SUITE dashboard and open the tab “user management”. At first you will see an overview of all users existing on the website you’re currently on including their email, user role and the number of posts created. You can change their roles here and when you click on “new user”, you will be sent to the default WordPress interface to create a new user.

Here under “roles” you can see all user roles currently existing on your page. You can edit them and you can also create new user roles and will be able to define very individually what that specific user role should have capabilities for, what they can do and can’t do. For example you could have an SEO writer that can do nothing more than edit and update posts on your website. You can create a user role for customers with which they can edit the content of their website, but cannot mess with the design since you prevent them for example from editing templates in the back end. And if you don’t want to go through all these very detailed settings each time individually, you can also copy the capabilities from an existing user role and use that as a template.

Down here you can also create meta fields, like for example the company, that you can then later query for example in the user registration form.

Here under “links” you can edit the login links, logout links, registration links and also the links for the password reset. That way you can for example hide the login page of your website to make it less vulnerable. And you can also define redirects for people who try to access an admin screen or an old screen that’s no longer available. You can redirect them to a 404 page, any custom URL, the home page or whatever.

And last but not least here are the emails. You can activate the SMTP function natively integrated in GREYD.SUITE that enables you to send your WordPress emails via a verified server, so that they don’t end up in the spam folder. Therefore just enter the respective data from the email provider and define whether and how your emails should be encrypted. You can also edit the sender of your email and also add additional users and/or people who should receive admin and/or user emails in CC or BCC. Down here you can even edit each email that is sent from WordPress individually including preview.

As you can see here, for both user and admin emails, there are some emails that are grayed out. This is because they are only editable via the network administration. That’s why we are now going to have a look at the user management from a network-wide perspective as well.

So, in general the settings here are pretty much the same. You have an overview of all your users, but this time all users of the entire installation including information on which websites they have access to and when they’ve been created. The user roles can be defined for each of your websites individually. You can again edit the links on your website, but this time for the entire installation. And as we’ve just discussed, there are some emails that you can only edit in the network administration.

So much to the settings for the user management in general. What can you do now with your custom user roles? Well, for once there’s gated content, thus content on your website that is only accessible by certain user groups. So for each page, post, form, popup etc. on your website you will find a setting here on the right that makes it possible to exclude this particular post for certain user roles. For example I do not want any SEO writer to be able to access this particular login page, so I enable this checkbox here. Each time an SEO writer is now trying to access that login page in the frontend, he or she will be shown the 404 page instead.

After the same principle you can also vary only sections within a page depending on who is visiting your website. We have a feature that’s called Dynamic Content. Dynamic Content makes it possible to display different contents automatically depending for example on the user role. So this entire section here for example is only visible if someone with the user role “unknown” — which means not logged in — is visiting my page, whereas this section here is only shown to those that are logged in. And the same I can do with for example popups. I can set them up in a way that they are only triggered if certain user roles including my custom user roles are visiting my website.

If you want to learn more about Dynamic Content, gated content or how to set up such user registration and login/logout forms and pages, then please have a look at our Helpcenter where we have dedicated tutorials on all of that.

For more videos and information, please visit our Helpcenter.