What permissions does a role need for the user to be assigned as the author of a post?

Question

I have a Wordpress site with custom roles (except for administrator) and now wanted to create a role so that a user with this role can be manually assigned as the author of a post. I thus created a role which had all permissions checked in the "post" submenu, but none in the others (since this role is only there for this reason). A user that has this role assigned can now however still not be chosen as the author of a post, but only the ones with an administrator role. My question therefore is:

What permissions does a role need so that the user can be assigned as the author of a post? I would really like to not make this user an administrator

Answer 1

You probably need to add 3 capabilities:

• edit_published_posts
• publish_posts
• delete_published_posts

but at the very least, you need to add publish_posts as that is the capability WordPress uses to determine what users are shown in Authors drop-down.

Note: Changing capabilities is stored in the database so the recommendation is to modify these values via a plugin and only when the plugin is activated or deactivated rather than on every request.