solution to prevent specific admins from altering site contents

Question

I wonder if there is a solution already present that will restrict even the top level admins that I select from doing things such as installing plugins, disabling plugins, etc. that an admin normally has access to.

I want to ensure that my team doesn't ever try to do anything on our testing or production environments that they should only be doing on a dev environment. Is there anything like this?

Answer 1

Yes, I use the Members plugin on a few projects where I need to customize or specify certain permissions.

Your workflow would be

• Create a new Role (named something like "Partial Admin" or whatever you'd like to name these people.
• Add those people to this role (removing them from the Administrator role).
• Edit the role permissions (for example, you would add or remove specific permissions for that role such as "Activate Plugins").

They get fairly specific, but it's easy to use, and I've not really run into any situations where that plugin couldn't do the job.

Have fun!

Answer 2

You can use a plugin like WP Admin UI to handle restricting access to certain user roles. In the WP Admin UI plugin, you can also assign "client admins" that have Admin rights but you can control exactly what they see.

Change the Login Screen, Remove/Reorder the Admin Menus, Show/Hide Plugin Access, Remove Unwanted MetaBoxes, Remove items from the Top Admin Bar, Restrict/Enable Editor Functions based on role. And, it plays well with other plugins in my experience.

This means if you were using a plugin like White-Label CMS to fully customize your backend to show the businesses own branding and had a client that wanted admin rights, you can set WP to give them rights while also restricting certain elements & hiding the WordPress Update notifications, removing all panels on the welcome dashboard and replacing them with your own, or even add your own logos on the header & footer panels in the back end.

I hope this helps.