CrazyLeaf Editorial
This article will cover different roles and user management in WordPress and some useful plugins to help maintain and Control Roles which every WordPress designer/maintainer should know.
Introduction
Though most of the blogs have one author many times blogs might require having multiple contributors. These contributors / guest authors might contribute with different articles to the blog. If a blog has multiple contributors then user management becomes necessary. User management helps to control the privileges each user might have in the blog.
A multi – user blog also becomes very vital if there are different people at different geographical locations contributing to the blog. WordPress as a blogging platform has got good user management capabilities. Also there are plugins which help us to enhance the user management capabilities of our wordpress blogs.
Adding New users
When WordPress is first installed, a user with the admin role is created automatically. New users can be added to your WordPress blog in two ways, covered below.
Administrator adding a new user
One can log in to the WordPress admin and the administrator can add new users to the WordPress blog.
From you admin sections in the side menu use the Users section .Under the Users section you will see a link as Add new. When that link is clicked the following screen will appear.
Enter the details for the new user like the username, his email and password and click Add User to add a new to your WordPress blog. The role which you assign to the user will depend on what privileges you want to provide to the new user. Below in the article we will see what are the different user roles and there privileges.
Once Add User is clicked a new user will be created.
Users registering themselves
In WordPress you have and you can activate the option so users can register themselves. This option can be turned on from the General Settings page in your admin section. You can also set the default role of any new user that registers (the admin can later change this role for that particular user).
Once this option is on, there would be a register link as shown below.
Using this link new users can register on your blog.
Different Roles in WordPress
Administrator
The Administrator is the person who can do all administrative tasks in WordPress.
The privileges of a WordPress administrator :
- An administrator can write and edit his own posts.
- An administrator when writes a post also can publish it directly
- An administrator can manage other peoples post
- An administrator can view other peoples posts
- An administrator can change themes
- An administrator can install uninstall plugins
- An administrator can add/delete users
Basically an Admistrator has privileges to do everything. An administrator account should basically be used for site management like installing plugins, changing themes etc. To do content management like reviewing posts, comments one should preferably use an editor account.
Editor
The privileges of a WordPress editor :
- An editor can write and edit his own posts.
- An editor when writes a post also can publish it directly
- An editor can manage other peoples post
- An editor can view other peoples posts
- An editor cannot change themes
- An editor cannot install uninstall plugins
- An editor cannot add/delete users
So an editor can do everything related to a post (all post management activities for himself and other users) but cannot do any site management activities like installing new plugins etc.
As seen below the editor dashboard does not have links related to plugins, themes etc (which are present in administrator Dashboard )
Author
The privileges of a WordPress author :
- An author can only write and edit his own posts.
- An author when writes a post also can publish it directly
- An author cannot manage other peoples post
- An author can view other peoples posts
As you can see below an author can edit posts only written by him and cannot edit posts written by others.
Contributor
The privileges of a WordPress contributor :
- A contributor can only write and edit his own posts .
- A contributor when writes a post also cannot publish it directly has to submit it for review .
- The editor then has to publish the post which is submitted by the contributor
- A contributor can view other peoples posts
As seen below the contributor can only submit an article for review, he cannot directly publish it.
Subscriber
The privileges of a WordPress subscriber :
- A Subscriber can view other people’s posts/comments.
- A Subscriber cannot only write his own posts.
Deleting Users
Sometimes some contributor or author might leave your blog and you don’t want him to be able to log in your blog again. In that case you can delete that user.The administrator has the privileges to delete other users. Just from your admin dashboard click on the Users link in your sidebar.
From there select the users you want to delete and select Delete and click Apply as shown below.
Useful Plugins
Role Scoper
The Role Scoper is a very handy plugin with a lot of features that enables you to control the reading and editing permission of pages, post and categories. You will have to download the plugin from the above link and activate the plug in from your admin section. Once that is done you will see the Role Scoper links in your left sidebar of you Admin section as shown below
This plugin keeps the core WordPress roles intact. In addition to the core roles you can add more content specific restrictions to the roles. Things like some post should only be seen by the editors of the site etc are possible using this plugin. So this plugin helps give wordpress a more CMS like feel.
When you are creating a new post you can specify who will be able to read or edit this post. As you can see in the example below the following post can be read only by the Admin Role .
So when a user with admin role tries to view the post he can view the post.
But if some one else tries to view the same post he will not be able to see the post as shown below.
Using the Role Scoper plugin one can even set restrictions on a specific category.
As shown below the Post Reader is restricted on the Personal category using the Role scoper plug in.
So when he tries to browse through the post of the Personal category he will get the message shown below.
To summarize the Role Scoper plugin has the following features :
- One can customize access to post using this plugin
- The WordPress roles remain intact using this plugin
- One can create Groups and assign restrictions to Groups
- One can assign restriction access on certain user for certain categories.
The plugin also offers many other features. You can visit the plugin page ( link provided above ) for a more comprehensive list of features of the plugin.
Other Helpful Plugins
Registered Only
This plugin helps to protect your WordPress blog by making the pages viewable only to the users who are registered with your wordpress blog. Once this plug in is activated unregistered users won’t be able to view the content of your blog.
WP-Members
This plugin also helps to restrict the viewable content of your wordpress blog to registered members of your blog. If this plug in is activated by default all the content of your blog is blocked from unregistered user. But the site owner can unblock the content using this plug in .This plugin also adds extra fields like name , address , phone etc to your wordpress registration form .
HidePost
This is a very useful plugin as it helps to hide a specific section of a post from unregistered users. So if you just want to show a teaser of your post and hide the rest of your content this plug in would be great for that. The content which you want to hide after this plug in is available you will just have to put it between the tags [hidepost] and [/hidepost]
Conclusion
User management becomes very essential once you blog grows. Once a blog becomes popular one person might not able to handle the content required to serve a large number of visitors. So you might have to get more people on board to perform different tasks. Also once a blog gets popular you might want to show specific content to users who are registered or with specific privileges. WordPress is a very good platform which provides good user management functionality. When the core user management functionality is not enough for your needs a number of useful wordpress plugins are available to add functionality to you core WordPress installation.
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