WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

26

Having Multiple Site Users

One of the ways people are making their sites more social these days is to create membership sites. These can range from multiple levels of paid membership to something as simple as a multiauthor blog. All of these structures depend on WordPress's built-in user roles. 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.

I discuss membership plugins in Lesson 37, which you'll need to help manage more complicated membership structures, but there's a lot you can do with the basic user function that comes with WordPress and that's what I cover here.

Don't confuse multiple users with WordPress's multisite capability. However many sites you may be running with a single WordPress installation, any one site can have multiple users. The multisite function is covered in Lesson 38.

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 ...