In this article I want to explain how in WordPress you can let an author manage categories and tags of posts.
By default the WordPress users with a role of type author cannot manage the categories and the tags of the posts. This means that in the WordPress backend, under Posts, this type of user does not have available the Categories and Tags menus:
To enable an author to manage post categories and tags you have 2 options.
If you have SSH access to your web server and you have the WP CLI installed you can run a command to add the manage_categories capability to the author role. Capabilities are stored in the database, so you have to run the command just once and you will enable permanently the authors to manage the categories and tags. The command to run is the following one:
wp cap add 'author' 'manage_categories'
If one day you want to remove this capability, you will simply have to execute the remove command:
wp cap remove 'author' 'manage_categories'
If you don’t have SSH access to your web server or the WP CLI is not installed there, you can use a plugin I developed. You can find this plugin in the GitHub account of the somedevtips.com website. The url of the plugin repository is the following one: https://github.com/somedevtips/somedevtips-roles-tweaks
The code of this plugin is very simple. Since the WordPress capabilities are stored permanently in the database, the plugin runs the code to add the capability only when the plugin is activated. When the plugin is deactivated, it removes the capability. This avoids writing in the database every time a website page is loaded.
After adding to the author the capability to manage categories and tags, he will have in the WordPress backend the menus available:
