You have an excellent site, but now you want to add a little more, either by asking associates to collaborate with you, or by adding another person to help you maintain the site.  It’s pretty easy to add people to your WordPress site, but did you know that you can assign a new user different levels of capability?  You may look at these roles in the drop-down box and say, fine and dandy, but what do they actually mean?

Here’s a breakdown:

  • Administrator:  Be careful when assigning this role to a user.  An administrator has full and complete ownership of a blog, and can do absolutely everything. This person has complete power over posts/pages, comments, settings, theme choice, import, users – the whole deal. Nothing is off-limits, including deleting the entire blog.  You may wish to limit the number of people you give this super-power to.
  • Editor: An editor can publish, edit, and delete any posts/pages, moderate comments, manage categories, manage tags, manage links and upload files/images.
  • Author: An author can edit, publish and delete only their posts, as well as upload files/images.
  • Contributor: A contributor can edit their posts but cannot publish them. When a contributor creates a post, it will need to be submitted to an administrator for review. Once a contributor’s post is approved by an administrator and published, however, it may no longer be edited by the contributor. A contributor does not have the ability to upload files/images.
  • Subscriber: Somebody who can only manage their profile.  A subscriber cannot write or manage anything on the site.  So why would you want to assign someone this capability?  Some blogs or WordPress sites require that someone be a member which grants them reading capability of certain blog posts.  You should assess your site’s capabilities and determine if this role is required.
How to Add a New User
First, you want to go into the Users section on the left column of your dashboard.  There you will see links to create new users, edit your profile, or edit existing users on your site.  Adding a new user is pretty simple.  Just type in their username, first and last name, email address, and assign them a password.  Then look at the Check the box that asks if you want to send this information to their email account, and they will receive a confirmation that they have been added to the site with a link to log in.

If you want to edit an existing user, just click on their name, and click on the role that you would like to assign.  Then click on the Update button.  You can also reset their password for them if they forgot and click the box to send the information to them by email.

Editing or Adding Users on WordPress.com

Here’s a great video tutorial on how to add or edit users on WordPress.com (not valid for self-hosted WordPress sites)

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Lisa Drew
WordPress Diva & Website Creator, Classical Singer, Artist
Websites for a Song LLC
https://websitesforasong.com

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