I think the author user role would basically allow you to do this. IIRC, an author can add and publish their own items, but they can’t touch items from another author.
Do you have a need to make it obvious that a particular item is from a specific vendor?
Thanks for the update 🙂 But can you please elaborate a bit on this functionality? I have the following queries in case a customer from front-end creates an order with items/products in their cart which belong to different authors/vendors:
- How will the order invoice, shipping cost (if any), tax applied (if any) be handled?
- Will each of the authors get intimated to process the order?
- How will the payments made on that order delivered/distributed among the authors?
- What are the privileges given to the author user?
- Are they allowed to add categories?
- Are they allowed to perform basic WordPress operations?
- Are they allowed to view product/orders of other authors?
My focus was just on the submitting of products. The other side of things is not so straightforward.
You probably wouldn’t want to allow the ability to add categories or other wordpress operations.
Well, you might need to create your own custom role for this particular purpose, though I don’t think you’d be able to manage the orders in the same segregated way – You could have the order notification emails sent to a distribution list that emailed all the vendors at once, or there might be a way to create a custom email action that only emailed X vendor when his products were included in the order.
You probably wouldn’t want to allow the ability to add categories or other wordpress operations.
Yes I don’t want authors to be able to access those features. Will they be hidden form authors? Or do I have to create a new role using another plugin?
Well, you might need to create your own custom role for this particular purpose, though I don’t think you’d be able to manage the orders in the same segregated way – You could have the order notification emails sent to a distribution list that emailed all the vendors at once, or there might be a way to create a custom email action that only emailed X vendor when his products were included in the order.
- Regarding the role: Do we have a plugin to achieve this functionality?
- Email Notification: Do we have to code it inside the plugin? Won’t it affect the upgradeability of the plugin?
If a user doesn’t have access to a particular area of wordpress, it will be hidden in the dashboard.
Yes, there is a plugin to edit user roles: User Role Editor
for the additional functionality, you would put it in your themes functions.php or wrap it inside a separate plugin.
Ok, thanks a lot for your help bheadrick 🙂
If you ever come across an addon which can link with woocomerce or any ecommerce plugin for that matter and provide a multi-vendor functionality right off the shelf can you please share it with me?
@charanjits – found anything? did you get this working? any suggestions?
would love to hear if anyone has this working. thank you.
@jdoe_ Not exactly so had to do a lot of custom coding using a lot of plugins, while the major plugins I used were:
and finally achieved what I was the requirement of the project.
But, I would not suggest anybody to go with WordPress if your requirement is a like mine, you should try out OpenCart, Magento etc. which have a lot of multi-vendor plugins/modules which entirely will cost you less in comparison and will provide a robust and scale-able solution.
thanks much charanjit..appreciate all the info.
i did look at opencart and magento but stayed away as i’m more comfortable with wordpress but the downside is it doesn’t seem flexible wrt ecommerce apps.
You are most welcome 🙂 ‘n’ Yes exactly! that is the only problem with making WordPress as a base for this kind of a project.
