WordPress: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Collaborating with Multiple Authors

When you first create a WordPress site, 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 comments, but you’re 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. You can, for example, create a site where several people 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 to check the work of contributors before it goes live, and you can even create an entirely private site that only the people you approve can view.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to enable all these features by registering new people—not new visitors, but new WordPress users who have special privileges on 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 People to Your Site

A new WordPress website starts with only one member: you. You assume ...