4 users, categories, and tags
Keeping things organized
It’s time to invite some friends to the party.
Blogging (or managing a WordPress site) doesn’t have to be a solitary venture. Loads of well-know blogs out there feature multiple user roles, from writers to editors and administrators. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to get multiple people posting on the same blog, manage the workflow across all those people, and put categories and tags to work in organizing your site’s content.
You’re the new editor of Thanks for Mutton
Thanks for Mutton is an online magazine—OK, a blog—that publishes about food and cooking from a uniquely geeky point of view. You’ve been brought in to bring some organization not only to the site (which runs on WordPress) but also to your group of staff writers and contributors. Let’s take a look and see what you’ve got to work with.
Now that you’ve seen what you’re dealing with here, take a few minutes to think about how you can get both your writers and the site’s content better organized.
WordPress user roles
A “user” in WordPress is any person that has access to your site with a username and password. WordPress allows you to add multiple users and give each of those users a role within the system. For example, we could have a main administrator that controls all aspects of the site and an editor that can only review and publish content but has no access to core WordPress settings. In general, user roles adhere to a heirarchical structure:
What are some reasons why there might be a much larger number of Contributors vs. Editors or Administrators?
The anatomy of a WordPress user
You are in control of adding users to your system, but WordPress is also set up to support visitors creating their own accounts too (so they can leave comments, for example). In this chapter, we focus on user accounts that you set up for people to write for your blog. Let’s take a look at the options you have for users in your WordPress dashboard.
Let’s see how the dashboard profile looks from a user’s perspective...
A sample user profile
Match each user role to the permissions it has within WordPress.
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I can write and edit my own posts but I can’t publish—all my posts must be submitted for review. |
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I can write and publish my own posts but I can’t modify or publish any other user’s posts. |
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I can write and publish my own posts but I also have full access to other users’ posts. I can do almost anything in the dashboard related to publishing. |
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I am usually an optional role and have no access to any dashboard features outside of the profile view. |
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I can do everything inside of WordPress including assigning roles to other users and changing site-wide settings. |
Administrator
Editor
Author
Contributor
SubscriberMatch each user role to the permissions it has within WordPress..
Match users to their appropriate roles
If you set up your blog to have 5 administrators and 20 people that all have access to publish content to the live site whenever they want, you’re going to have problems. It may seem a bit foreign at first, but for each user, spend a bit of time thinking about what they are doing on the site, and how much responsibility they should be given. Beyond that, here’s a good rule of thumb based on the user hierarchy pyramid: The higher the role in the system, the fewer users should be assigned to that role.
Who gets the nice wine glass at your party, and who gets the plastic cup?
Write down each staff member’s role next to their name and then create a user account for them with the appropriate role.
Write down each staff member’s role next to their name and then create a user account for them with the appropriate role.
Avoid chaos with an editorial workflow
Now that we have a group of users with specific roles for Thanks for Mutton, we can take a quick look at what the editorial workflow might look like. The term “workflow” simply refers to how pages and posts move betwen content producers and editors when some form of review and approval is required— potentially multiple times—before somthing is published. The site has two main content producers: authors, who are staff writers with publishing rights, and contributors, who are contract or seasonal writers that submit stories for publication.
Review pending posts from the admin dashboard
Once a post is submitted for review, the editors and administrators need to be able to read it, make changes, and then post it to the site.
Submit for Review.
Contributors submit articles for review by editors. These posts will show “pending” until they’ve been approved.
As an editor (or and administrator) you can publish pending posts.
When an editor sees pending posts, they have the options to read and edit the content before it goes live on the site.
Things are starting to look more organized...
Categories are big buckets for your content
Categories aren’t always required for blogs, but most of the time it helps to have some organizational structure to your posts. Think of categories as broad “buckets” that describe or hold your content in WordPress. Once a post is assigned to a category, it can be displayed in WordPress alongside other posts within the same category. They also give visitors a snapshot of what type of content they can expect on your site and help them find other posts they might be interested in.
Categories help organize your content
When creating categories, think about the big concepts behind particular posts—and even behind the site as a whole. Categories should be very well thought out—almost sacred—so don’t just add them on a whim. If you find yourself adding lots of different categories, you’re probably not being broad enough. Categories represent the main areas of content of your site, so treat them accordingly.
Content is key when creating category structures
As the editor of Thanks for Mutton, you’ll want to take some time and think about what you want the site to be about, and what’s the best way to organize it before you start adding categories. This way, you can set up a category structure that fits your content well so you’re not always scrambling to figure out what bucket a post belongs in, and you (or your authors) are not always creating new categories every time a new post goes up on the site.
Use the magnets below to build a category structure for Thanks for Mutton. You don’t have to use all the magnets, and remember to think about big, broad bucket for your content.
Use the magnets below to build a category structure for Thanks for Mutton. You don’t have to use all the magnets, and remember to think about big, broad bucket for your content.
Leftover categories often make good tags
Don’t worry if you have categories left over—that’s a good thing! This usually means that the remaining categories are too narrow and might be better used as what are called “tags” within a post. Tags are specific terms that give more detail about the content of the post—a post about sous vide cooking might be in the “Techniques” category and have tags like “sous vide” and “meat.” A good rule of thumb is that a post should have a single category and one or more tags. Use tags to add detail once you’ve placed your post in a larger category bucket.
Posts should have a single category and one or more tags.
Go back into WordPress and add the category structure you built in the Magnets exercise. Then, add specific tags to the posts that have already been published—this will act as a starting point for new posts and authors. Remember: look closely at the articles when choosing categories and tags and make them specific to your content.
Go back into WordPress and add the category structure you built in the Magnets exercise. Then, add specific tags to the posts that have already been published—this will act as a starting point for new posts and authors. Remember: look closely at the articles when choosing categories and tags and make them specific to your content.
Add categories from the post menu.
You can add categories from within a post or from the category page in the posts menu. Either way, they end up in the same place.
Both categories and tags can be added to a post from the new or edit post screens. The sidebar will show all the categories used on your site in addition to a list of the most used tags.
Tonight’s talk: Categories and Tags sound off about who offers the most information to site visitors.
Categories: |
Tags: |
I’d just like to start by saying that I’m the original taxonomy. I was around before tags were even a twinkle in WordPress’s eye. In fact, the original tagging structure in WordPress was built on top of the category system. |
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Just because you’ve been around longer doesn’t mean you’re better. You are too broad, you give people no in-depth information about an article. Big “buckets.” What’s that all about? |
Oh, come on—broad topics are the only way to go. A site visitor can take one quick look at a category list and know exactly what kind of content is on a site or page. Tags only give me information when I click on a post and scroll all the way to the bottom. Plus, everyone understands categories—you always have to explain yourself to people. |
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Obviously you’ve never heard of a tag cloud. You can put it right on the home page and it gives you WAY more information then a list of categories. It shows what are the most popular topics on the site. Popular stuff, that’s what people want. Plus, it’s not enough to say this post is about design—you need to tell them what kind of design. |
Oh, here we go with the tag cloud argument. You know, if I wanted to I could display myself as a tag cloud. Plus, what year is it—2007? Tag clouds, pssh... |
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Well, why don’t you then? I’m sure your users would appreciate it. And don’t think my only trick is the tag cloud. I’ve seen users do pretty cool things with bar graphs and all sorts of other cool visuals based on tags. |
Well, if I’m used properly there shouldn’t be that many of me. It’s kind of hard to make a tag cloud out of 5 categories. Let’s just agree that we do different things. You handle the details and I take care of the big picture. You can’t have a blog without categories! Can you?... |
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Whoa. You sound a little nervous—like you think you may be obsolete. Personally, I think you are useful when used correctly, but most people abuse your power. Have you ever been to a site with hundreds of categories? It’s overkill and it just makes you look like you can’t focus. |
Agreed... A compromise then. I’ll take care of the “big picture” and you can deal with all the little details. I don’t want to do that stuff anyway. Oh, you can also keep the tag cloud—I’m old-school like that. |
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All right, that sounds like a plan to me. |
Writers want their pictures next to their posts
Now that we have some organization to Thanks for Mutton, the writers are starting to ask for more features. They’d like to know if you can add their images to posts, and to comments that they make on posts. They’ve noticed this on other sites and think it would be a good idea to put faces to names on the blog.
Gravatar makes user pictures easy
Gravatar is a service by Automattic—the same folks that maintain WordPress. It stores “avatar,” or profile, images tied to an email address on its servers so websites around the Internet can use those images to display the avatar of users logged in to their sites. The idea is that you can upload an image once and use it across any site that supports Gravatar.
Head on over to gravatar.com and sign up for an account (if you don’t already have one). Once you’re all set up, make sure that the email you used for Gravatar matches the email in your WordPress profile.
Head on over to gravatar.com and sign up for an account (if you don’t already have one). Once you’re all set up, make sure that the email you used for Gravatar matches the email in your WordPress profile.
Sign up with your email address.
You have to use an active email address with Gravatar. They will send you a verification to make sure you are who you say you are...
Upload your image to Gravatar.
Once the account is created you can upload an image, resize it, and link it to your email address within Gravatar.
Use your Gravatar email in your WordPress profile.
In order for your avatar image to show up properly in WordPress you need to use the same email address in your profile that you used to set up your Gravatar account.
Gravatar works with your email address
Gravatar works by linking your email address to an avatar image that’s stored on the Gravatar servers. When an application or website that uses the Gravatar service wants to display your picture, it sends an encrypted version of your email to Gravatar along with information like file size and type. Gravatar then sends back a picture of your pretty face, auto-magically!
Here is what a request to Gravatar might look like:
Gravatar supports WordPress comments out-of-the-box
Gravatar is baked right into WordPress (it helps that they’re run by the same company) and only takes a few settings to get it up and running on your blog.
Check the Gravatar setting in the Discussion menu.
All your options for modifying Gravatar are located at the bottom of the Discussion menu. You can choose to display avatars, what “rating” you’ll allow, and how the default icon looks if a user doesn’t have Gravatar.
Save and Check
Once you save your avatar settings, go back to the dashboard and see if the new images are showing up.
Extending Gravatar’s functionality
So it turns out that Gravatar was intended only to support showing images next to comments. To get it working with our author’s posts, let’s investigate what makes Gravatar work in our comment template and see if we can’t use the same code to get avatars showing up in our main post bylines. Often a little detective work like this will help you figure out how to extend certain built-in functionality to other areas of your blog.
functions.php
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 40 ); ?>
This is a PHP function that gets our Gravatar image for WordPress. We can give it a size and it will display an image next to the comment. Do you know which file we should add this to in order to get images next to the authors’ names on their post?
Ready Bake Code
As you’re already starting to figure out, anytime we make a change to our template markup (HTML) we need to make an associated style (CSS) change. Let’s add some style rules to make the authors’ pictures fit a bit better.
Your WordPress Toolbox
You’ve got Chapter 4 under your belt and now you’ve added user accounts, categories and tags, and avatar images to your tool box. Next up, adding video to your blog.
Always create individual accounts for your users. Having everyone log in with the same admin account can cause problems and increases the chance of content going AWOL.
Assign roles to users based on how much access you want to give them in WordPress.
A good rule of thumb for permissions is to allow fewer and fewer people access as you get higher into the permission structure.
Categories help you organize content on your site and act as big “buckets” that group similar posts and pages together.
An post should have one category and one or more tags.
Tags are similar to categories but they often focus on more specific content within a post.
Gravatar is a simple service that allows you to upload a single avatar image to one place and then use it across all your social sites.
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