This blog runs on a multisite, so I can easily translate all my blost posts using MultilingualPress. Another website on this multisite installation is the website for WP Meetup Berlin. On this site, another user has the admin role. With this role you can usually do most of the things an admin on a single site can do. With some exceptions:

• Updating core, plugins, themes, etc.
• Adding sites
• Adding new users
• Installing plugins
• Installing themes
• Using the plugin/theme editor (which you should never do anyways)
• Use unfiltered HTML
• Use the custom CSS option in the customizer

This last exceptions really surprised me. I always thought that this would be the only possible option for site admins to change the design of the site (as they can’t install themes or child themes or change their files). But only superadmins have this option.

Enabling the option for site admin

Fortunately, there is a capabilty called edit_css you can simply assign to the admins. You can do this using a role management plugin such as Members or you simply install the plugin Multisite Custom CSS which is doing exactly this one thing.

Conclusion

For security reasons, it makes sense to not allow the admins of a multisite website to change the theme files. But not allowing them to edit the Custom CSS in the Customizer doesn’t make sense in my opinion. But using one of the plugins, it’s pretty easy to enable this option.