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Chapter 26. Having Multiple Site Users

Even in a small company or organization, you may need more than one person working on your website. At the same time, you may not want each of those people to have the same access to the site, such as the ability to change the theme or delete pages. WordPress makes the management of these various levels of access quite easy through what are called roles.

The whole purpose of having different roles is to prevent people from making bad mistakes and doing something that affects the entire site. That's where careful thinking about a user's requirements is so crucial — you only want them to have permissions that allow them to do their particular work.

User Roles and Their Capabilities

There are five user roles in WordPress and in order of decreasing capabilities they are:

• Administrator

• Editor

• Author

• Contributor

• Subscriber

In the case of Island Travel, with its two offices, I could have a single Administrator to take care of technical aspects of the site, and a single Editor who oversees all site content. Each travel agent could be an Author managing their own posts, with a few non-agency people who act as Contributors. Customers and potential customers could be Subscribers who are able to view website content that the public can't see.

With these examples in mind, let's go through each of the five user roles in a bit more detail:

• Administrator: As the name suggests, an Administrator has access to every single administrative function in WordPress, including ...