For my Marbella news site I recently hired an excellent free-lance writer on Elance to assist me in composing quality articles. As the site is also powered by WordPress I added him as a contributor to start of with. He explained he had some trouble adding images per the guide I sent him. The “Upload/Insert” image button was simply not there.

So to summarise, the WordPress contributor role apparently lacks this permission. There are a few plugins around that can let you tweak those permissions with more granularity, but I just needed that single change.

A bit of searching revealed exactly what I needed. One minor change in the theme’s functions file was sufficient to upload & insert images as a WordPress contributor:

if ( current_user_can('contributor') && !current_user_can('upload_files') )
	add_action('admin_init', 'allow_contributor_uploads');
 
function allow_contributor_uploads() {
	$contributor = get_role('contributor');
	$contributor->add_cap('upload_files');
}