The Replicate roles tool copies your Church Admin ministries across to matching WordPress user roles. Once your ministry members hold a WordPress role, you can use other plugins to control what those people can see and do on your site — for example, showing a page only to your service leaders.
Why you’d use this
Church Admin knows who’s in each ministry, but WordPress and its access-control plugins work on roles. This tool bridges the two: it takes the people in a ministry and gives their WordPress user accounts a role of the same name. You can then use a membership or access plugin to lock pages or features to that role.
A typical example: you want a page only your service leaders can see when they log in. You would:
- In Church Admin, create a Service Leader ministry and add your service leaders to it.
- Create a WordPress role called Service Leader — the name must match the ministry name exactly.
- Run Replicate roles to add everyone in that ministry to the new role.
- Use an access-control plugin to apply whatever restrictions you want to that role.
Before you run it
Two things need to be in place first:
- The people must have WordPress user accounts. Only people whose Church Admin record is linked to a WordPress user can be given a role. You can create accounts with the Create User Accounts button on the People tab.
- The matching WordPress roles must already exist. This tool doesn’t create roles — you make them yourself with a role-management plugin. User Role Editor and Advanced Access Manager (AAM) are two popular options. Each role’s name must match its ministry name exactly.
Running the tool
Click the Replicate roles button. The tool works through everyone who has a linked WordPress account, looks up the ministries they belong to, and adds them to the matching role. As it runs, it reports what it did line by line, for example:
- Adding a role to a person who didn’t already have it.
- Noting where a person already has a role, so nothing changes.
- Warning where no matching WordPress role was found — with a reminder to create that role manually if you need it.
That last message is your cue that a ministry has no equivalent WordPress role yet: create it and run the tool again.
Important limitations
- It only adds, never removes. The tool adds people to roles but doesn’t take anyone out. If you remove someone from a ministry, they keep the WordPress role until you remove it — either delete it from that person manually, or clear everyone from the role and run the tool again to rebuild it.
- Names must match exactly. The ministry name and the WordPress role name have to be the same, or the tool can’t pair them.
- You need a separate plugin to create roles and to enforce access. Church Admin handles the membership; the role management and the actual restrictions are done by plugins like User Role Editor or AAM.