WordPress: The Missing Manual

Chapter 11. Collaborating with Multiple Authors

When you start out with WordPress, it’s a solo affair. You choose your site’s theme, write every post and page, and put every widget in place. Your readers can add their own comments, but you’re the one in charge of starting every conversation.

You might like this arrangement (and if so, that’s fine). But WordPress also makes it possible for you to have friends, colleagues, family members, and even complete strangers contribute to your site. For example, you can create a site where several people can post content, or you could be more selective, letting some people write content and others review and edit it. You can also implement an approval system so you can check the work of other contributors before it goes live, and you can even create an entirely private site that can be viewed only by the people you approve.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to enable all these features by registering new users—not new visitors, but new users who have special privileges to use your site. You’ll also consider WordPress’s more ambitious multisite feature that’s open to self-hosters only. With a multisite network, you can let other people create their own sites on your web server. For example, big companies can use the multisite feature to give each employee a personal blog. Essentially, the multisite feature lets a whole family of WordPress sites exist side-by-side, on the same domain.

Adding Users to Your Site

A new WordPress website starts with ...