How to get all users with Author role capabilities?

Question

I need to fetch the list of all users who are Authors (with Author capabilities)

get_users allows to fetch users with roles, but if users are filter with author role, it skips users with role admin and editor (but they can also create posts).

So I need some other way to fetch all users having capability of Author Role (they can be from Administator, Editor or any other custom roles with Authors capability)

To Be more precise - Need all users with "publish_posts" capability.

Answer 1

Here's a way to collect roles with the publish_posts capability:

$roles__in = [];
foreach( wp_roles()->roles as $role_slug => $role )
{
    if( ! empty( $role['capabilities']['publish_posts'] ) )
        $roles__in[] = $role_slug;
}

and then we can query users with these roles:

if( $roles__in )
    $users = get_users( [ 'roles__in' => $roles__in, 'fields' => 'ids' ] );

where we might need pagination for large amount of users.

One can also loop over few users and check with:

user_can( $user, 'publish_posts' )

See docs here.

Answer 2

Basically, there are 3 roles who have a right to publish post - "Administrator", "Editor" & "Author", unless you are adding any custom roles.

So you can do is specify an array of these 3 in your get_users function. Something like this:

get_users( array(
        'role__in'     => array('administrator', 'editor', 'author'),
    ) );

This will give you the user details with these roles in array which you can use as convenience.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Answer 3

I realize this is an old question but, if you want to get all users that have a given capability, either directly or via a role, the current top answer (by @birgire) will be very inefficient, particularly if you have a lot of users. The first part of that answer needs improving only slightly to get all users in one call to get_users();

$roles = array( 'publish_posts' );
foreach( wp_roles()->roles as $role_slug => $role ) {
    if( ! empty( $role['capabilities']['publish_posts'] ) ) {
        $roles[] = $role_slug;
    }
}
$user_ids = get_users( array( 'role__in' => $roles, 'fields' => 'ids' ) );

Simply by initializing the $roles array with the capability you are checking for, all users that have that capability directly will be included.

Answer 4

Use get_role() for getting capabilities from any role of the user in your code.