How to update WordPress user role capabilities using a simple PHP script and WordPress user functions. I came upon this issue recently in which I had full access to a WordPress installation; files, database, etc., but my WordPress user account was originally added as an Editor or some lower role by a client/third party and I really needed to update to an Administrator role. Of course without the original Administrator account I couldn’t update my own role so I needed to create a script to cleanly edit user role/capabilities. Below is a script to change a WordPress user role using the WordPress function wp_update_user:

/*
 * Updates user role using WordPress function wp_update_user.
 *
 * Simple script to be run at webroot. Update user_id and new_role to taste
 * and run as regular PHP file on command line.
 *
 * @package WordPress
 */
 
require( './wp-load.php' );
 
// id of user to update
$user_id = 2;
 
/*
 * Basic list of user roles
 *
 * administrator
 * editor
 * author
 * contributor
 * subscriber
 *
 */
 
// user role to update to
$new_role = 'administrator';
 
// update user role using wordpress function
wp_update_user( array ('ID' => $user_id, 'role' => $new_role ) ) ;

You can take this and save it out as a file called manually-update-role.php or whatever you like. Open the file and update user_id and new_role and then run. Check that it ran successfully (the user role should of course be changed) and remove file. Run the file like so:

php manually-update-role.php

There are a couple pages on the web which I used as a resource:

• http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/4725/how-to-change-a-users-role
• http://www.shinephp.com/how-to-change-wordpress-user-role-capabilities/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-role-editor/
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_update_user