WordPress: The Missing Manual, 3rd 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 other people review and edit it. You can also implement an approval system to check the work of contributors before it goes live. 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 lets other people create their own sites on your web hosting account. For example, big companies can use the multisite feature to give each employee a personal blog on the same company website.

Adding People to Your Site

A new WordPress website starts with only one member: you. You assume the role of administrator, which means you can do anything from write a post to vaporize the entire site. Eventually, you may decide ...