WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 26Managing Multiple Site Users

One of the ways you can make your site social is to give special access to certain visitors: pages that only they can see or documents only they can download. These visitors could be your clients or members of your local association, or they could be anyone who wants to sign up. Whatever the case, you grant them this special access by making them Users in WordPress.

A User is someone who can log in to your WordPress site, and every User has one of five possible Roles, which determines what they're allowed to do when they're logged in. What actions they're allowed to take are referred to as Capabilities.

Now, it's possible you'll be the only User your site will ever have, but in most cases there are going to be at least some additional Users and this lesson is about how to manage them.

User Roles and Their Capabilities

As mentioned, five User Roles are built in to 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 can view website content the public can't see but have no control on the back end or administrative side ...