User Roles & Permissions

Understanding how the plugin uses WordPress roles is key to setting up the right access controls for your organisation.

How roles work in the plugin

The plugin uses the WordPress role system for two distinct purposes:

Document visibility — Which roles can see, search, and open a document
Admin access — Which roles can manage documents, settings, and compliance data in the WordPress admin

These two concepts are separate. A user with the Subscriber role (typically a regular staff member) can be given access to read documents, but they cannot open the plugin’s admin screens or edit anything.

The plugin adds its own admin menu, Policy Management, containing Compliance Overview, Acknowledgements, Pending Approvals, Edit Suggestions, Analytics, Tools, Page Gating and Settings. Some items only appear when the related feature is switched on (for example, Edit Suggestions and Page Gating).

Default WordPress roles and what they can do

Administrator

Full access to everything. Administrators can:

Create, edit, publish, and delete all documents and FAQs
Open every Policy Management screen: Compliance Overview, Acknowledgements, Pending Approvals, Edit Suggestions, Analytics, Tools, Page Gating and Settings
Change all plugin settings
View every user’s acknowledgement records and record an acknowledgement on someone’s behalf (when Allow Acknowledge on Behalf is switched on)
Read every document regardless of its audience
Bypass page gating
Generate attestation exports
Create user accounts and assign the Policy Auditor role

Editor

Editors manage documents in the same way they manage WordPress posts. Editors can:

Create, edit, and publish documents and FAQs (including other people’s)
Review and act on Edit Suggestions, when that feature is switched on
See change descriptions in a document’s version history when Changelog Description Visibility is set to editors

Editors cannot open Compliance Overview, Acknowledgements, Analytics, Pending Approvals, Tools or Settings, and they cannot generate attestation exports. To let an editor approve version changes, add the Editor role to Approver User Roles under Policy Management → Settings → User Management.

Author

Authors work with documents in the same way they work with posts. Authors can:

Create and publish their own documents
Edit documents they wrote

Authors cannot edit other users’ documents or open the plugin’s admin screens.

Contributor

Contributors can draft documents but cannot publish them. Their drafts must be reviewed and published by an Editor or Administrator.

Subscriber

The typical “staff member” role. Subscribers can:

Read documents whose audience includes their role
Acknowledge documents they are asked to acknowledge
View their own acknowledgement history on the My Acknowledgements page
Bookmark documents and save searches
Submit edit suggestions, if Edit Suggestions is switched on and their role is selected under Suggestion Roles by Document Type
Rate FAQs and documents as helpful or not helpful

Subscribers have no access to the WordPress admin beyond their own profile.

The Policy Auditor role

The plugin creates a custom role: Policy Auditor.

This role is designed for external auditors who need read-only access to your compliance records during an audit. A Policy Auditor can:

View the Compliance Overview dashboard
View the Acknowledgements screen and acknowledgement records (read-only)
View the Analytics dashboard
Read every document, whatever its audience, including the version history shown on each document page
Generate and download attestation exports (CSV and PDF)
View user lists (read-only)

A Policy Auditor cannot:

Create, edit, or publish documents
Approve versions or moderate edit suggestions
Record acknowledgements on anyone’s behalf
Open Settings, Tools, or Pending Approvals
See or modify user accounts

Creating an auditor user:

Go to Users → Add New User.
Create a WordPress account for the auditor.
Set their role to Policy Auditor.
Share the login details with the auditor.
When the audit window closes, delete the account or change its role.

Role-based document visibility

Two settings on each document control who can see it. Both are in the Document Settings box on the document edit screen:

Confidentiality — Set to Public to let anyone, including logged-out visitors, read the document. Internal Use, Confidential, Restricted and Unclassified documents require visitors to log in and are role-gated.
Target Audience (Roles) — Tick the WordPress roles allowed to read a non-public document. If you leave every role unticked, any logged-in user can read it.

Together these settings control:

Whether the document appears in the Document Hub
Whether the document appears in search results
Whether the document can be opened directly by URL
Whether the document can be downloaded as a PDF

Administrators and Policy Auditors can always read every document. A document with a future Effective From date stays hidden from staff until that date (editors can still preview it).

Who must acknowledge is set separately, in the Acknowledgement panel of the editor sidebar (Target roles and Target user lists). Make sure everyone you ask to acknowledge a document can also read it.

Example setup:

Document	Confidentiality	Target Audience (Roles)
Staff Code of Conduct	Internal Use	Subscriber, Author, Editor, Administrator
Management Performance Policy	Confidential	Editor, Administrator
Finance SOPs	Restricted	(custom Finance role)
Public Compliance Statement	Public	(none needed)

A staff member with the Subscriber role who visits the Management Performance Policy URL sees an “Access Restricted” message instead of the content — the document is genuinely inaccessible, not just hidden from menus. Logged-out visitors see a “Login Required” message. You can change the wording of both messages under Policy Management → Settings → User Management → Access Control Messages.

Custom roles

If your organisation has custom WordPress roles (added by your theme, a membership plugin, or another plugin), the plugin works with them automatically. Custom roles appear in:

The Target Audience (Roles) field on each document
The acknowledgement Target roles list
The Default Audience step of the Setup Wizard
The Compliance by role table on the Compliance Overview dashboard
The User Role filter on the Analytics dashboard

You do not need to do anything to add custom roles to the plugin — they are discovered automatically.

Changing what each role can do

WordPress capabilities control what each role can do. You can grant the plugin’s capabilities to other roles using a role management plugin (such as Members or User Role Editor).

Plugin-specific capabilities:

Capability	Granted by default to	What it controls
`dpma_manage_settings`	Administrator	Change plugin settings; Pending Approvals; Page Gating
`dpma_manage_acknowledgements`	Administrator	Manage acknowledgement records, including acknowledging on someone’s behalf
`dpma_view_acknowledgements`	Administrator, Policy Auditor	View acknowledgement records and generate attestation exports
`dpma_view_analytics`	Administrator, Policy Auditor	Open Compliance Overview and Analytics
`dpma_view_all_documents`	Administrator, Policy Auditor	Read every document regardless of its audience
`dpma_edit_documents`	Administrator, Editor	See change descriptions when they are limited to editors
`dpma_approve_edits`	Administrator, Editor	Review and act on Edit Suggestions

Creating and editing documents uses the standard WordPress post permissions, so Editors, Authors and Contributors work with documents exactly as they do with posts. The Tools screen requires full administrator rights.

🔒 Pro feature — requires the Pro plugin.

Pro screens and who can use them

The Pro add-on uses the same permissions. With default roles:

Screen or action	Needs	Administrator	Policy Auditor	Editor
Document Compliance dashboard, including Bulk Edit	Manage settings	Yes	No	No
Calendar	View analytics	Yes	Yes	No
Frameworks (Framework Library) and the Framework Editor — corpus, briefs, auto-fetch	Manage settings	Yes	No	No
Coverage & Gaps — view the readiness matrix	View acknowledgements	Yes	Yes	No
Coverage & Gaps — Map policy, + Create, coverage detail, Export Survey Packet	Manage acknowledgements (plus permission to edit or create the document)	Yes	No	No
Evidence Pack (a tab on Tools)	Full administrator rights to open Tools, and Manage acknowledgements to generate	Yes	No	No
AI Costs tab on Analytics	Manage settings	Yes	No	No
Run Compliance Audit on a document	Permission to edit the document	Yes	No	Yes
Approve AI audit changes on Edit Suggestions	Review and act on Edit Suggestions	Yes	No	Yes
Pending Approvals, including Approve (bypass chain)	Manage settings	Yes	No	No

Approval-chain approvers don’t need any of these permissions — they approve from the link in their email. If the Pro licence is not active, Document Compliance and Calendar show an “activate your licence” page instead.

Multisite considerations

On a WordPress multisite network, activate the plugin on each site individually — network activation is not supported. Each site has its own document library, acknowledgement records, roles, and settings. There is no “share policies across the network” feature. If you need documents visible across several sites, manage them on one site and link to that site’s Document Hub from the others.

Each site’s Policy Auditor role and compliance data are independent.

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