Plugin dev – custom taxonomies are grayed-out in custom post for authors

Hello,

I am hoping this is the correct forum, please let me know if it should be moved. I wasn’t sure if this is a plugin, a hack, or if it should be in some other help forum.

I am working on a plugin that uses custom posts and several custom taxonomies. Only Editors and Administrators can edit and add taxonomies, and users can edit and add to the custom posts.

The custom posts should replace regular built-in posts for the “Author” role. That is, in my plugin, posts should only be editable and can only be added by Editors and up – and authors can only add custom posts.

I think I screwed something up when I did this, though, because now I have a problem.

When the taxonomies (only editable/addable by admin/editor) were connected to regular built-in Posts, the authors who edited the posts could select whatever terms they wanted, just like they can with categories. That worked perfectly.

But when I switched the capabilities to disallow authors editing of built-in posts and only allow them custom posts (and switched the taxonomy connection to the custom post) the problem began: Now, authors see the meta box for the taxonomies, but all terms are disabled. They can’t actually select any of them.

I’m guessing I missed giving my authors a role, but I can’t figure out which. Can anyone help?

Just to recap:

– Admins and Editors can add terms to my custom taxonomy (which is connected to a custom post type)
– Authors see the taxonomy list when editing the custom post type, but can’t actually select any of the terms
– I manually removed Authors’ capabilities related to built-in posts and added them again only to Editor/Admin (and probably screwed something up there?)

Thanks in advance!

mooeypoo