Roles and Capabilities

Learnomy adds two roles on top of WordPress -- Student and Instructor -- and gates every action through a single permission check. New sign-ups become students automatically; instructors are approved by an admin. WordPress administrators always have full access.

What you can do#

• Let anyone who registers through Learnomy start as a Student with the right to enroll, learn, take quizzes, and leave reviews.
• Promote a member to Instructor by approving their application, which adds course authoring, quiz management, grading, and their own students and earnings.
• Keep full control with the WordPress Administrator, who has every Learnomy capability plus the site-wide settings.
• Rely on one permission gate for every action, so access is decided the same way across the frontend, the admin, and the API.

How to use it#

Students -- automatic on registration#

When someone registers through Learnomy they are assigned the Student (lrn_student) role immediately. They can browse the catalog, enroll, take lessons and quizzes, and review courses without any further setup.

Instructors -- admin-approved#

An instructor is not self-serve. A member applies to become an instructor, which creates an application for review. An admin approves it from Learnomy > Applications, and on approval the member gains the Instructor (lrn_instructor) role in addition to their student role. From then on they can create and manage their own courses, manage quizzes, grade submissions, and see their own students and earnings.

Administrators#

Any WordPress user with the Administrator role has every Learnomy capability, including the academy-wide settings, categories, certificate management, instructor approvals, and analytics. You do not assign Learnomy roles to admins -- their access is total by default.

Settings and options#

The three roles and what each can do:

Notes:

• Instructor access is scoped to the instructor's own content -- for example, the grading inbox and earnings show only their own courses' data, not the whole site's.
• WordPress subscribers are also granted the student capabilities, so an existing subscriber can enroll and learn without a separate Learnomy account.
• Both Learnomy roles carry WordPress's baseline read capability, so dashboard, profile, and application flows behave like any other logged-in WordPress user.

For developers#

• Roles + capabilities: registered in Learnomy\Permissions\Capabilities. Student caps: learnomy_enroll, learnomy_learn, learnomy_take_quiz, learnomy_leave_review, learnomy_view_courses. Instructor adds: learnomy_create_course, learnomy_manage_own_courses, learnomy_view_own_students, learnomy_view_own_earnings, learnomy_manage_quizzes, learnomy_grade, upload_files. Admin adds: learnomy_manage_settings, learnomy_manage_categories, learnomy_manage_users, learnomy_manage_certificates, learnomy_approve_instructor, learnomy_view_analytics.
• The single gate: every access decision goes through Learnomy\Permissions\Permission_Engine::can( $user_id, $action, $context_id ). It short-circuits to allow any user with manage_options (administrators), otherwise maps the action to the matching WordPress capability. REST controllers call it in their permission_callback; nothing checks capabilities directly.
• Role maintenance: Capabilities::register() is idempotent and self-heals -- it re-applies any capability missing from an existing role on upgrade, so a role created on an older version still gains new caps.

Related#

• Introduction
• Setup Wizard