How to Run WordPress Simultanously as Admin, Editor and Guest

Okay, this applies to any web-application that requires to log in for performing special tasks. But since the purpose of this blog is to help WordPress (plugin) developers and those who want to become such, I’ll write it just from this perspective. I’ll stick to the approved “5 Steps” method to structure the tutorial.

The Situation:

You are developing a WordPress Plugin that features functionality for the blog frontend as well as some backend interfaces for the admin. The administration interface should only be accessible to admins and NOT to logged in editors.

How can you test this different userroles without being forced to log out and log in as a different user all the time?

There is a simple solution to this problem:

Run Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox at the same time. Since every application will have it’s own session, you’ll be able to identify yourself as three different users to your WordPress installation.
The good thing about this solution is: You don’t need to tweak anything and you’re testing your blog on different target browsers, which is quite a good thing to do.

But when it comes to operate such great software as firebug, which is a firefox extension, you’ll have to get firefox as the better browser for web-development to run multiple sessions simultanously.

So how can you run different sessions with firefox?

Here are the 5 Steps:

Step 1

Close firefox and go to Start > Run, type in cmd and hit enter to get a command prompt.
Enter C:[Path to your Programs Folder]Mozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe -ProfileManager

On Linux or Mac OSX it is ./firefox -ProfileManager

Step 2

Create some Firefox user profiles. I recommend to create one for being admin, another for your editor rode an a third one for the not logged in guest user. Of course you can create as much as you want.

Hit finish after that.

Step 3

Create some Shortcuts on your Desktop (or elsewhere).

The easiest way to get them is to ALT+drag your firefox shortcut three times, renaming the resulting shortcuts to your different firefox profile names.

Right-Click the shortcut icons and click “properties”. Edit thetarget value for the shortcuts to load firefox with the respective profile: simply add -P “profile-name” after the program target entry that looks like C:[Path to your Programs Folder]Mozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe.

Step 4

Still not running Firefox, you have to set a little environment variable named MOZ_NO_REMOTE to the binary value of 1. In you open commend promt, type:
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 and hit enter.

Step 5

Now you are ready to run three firefox sessions at the same time! Doubleclick the three shortcuts and start configuring these profiles by adding extensions to firefox, setting cache limits, et cetera.

That’s it!