Creating Users in WordPress

Know Your Options

We’ve been looking at the administrator login. That’s the user who controls everything about the site. The look and feel, as well as the site settings on top of the content itself.

However, you could create a team of users and not everybody’s going to be an administrator. Most likely, you’re just going to have one administrator who controls the entire site, and then you’re going to have some people who control the content itself.

So let’s look at adding new users.

Because we’re in an administrator account, in my Sidebar Menu I can create additional users. I’ll go to All Users, and you’ll notice there’s just my administrator account.

I can create a new user by going to the Toolbar, hovering on New, and clicking User. You’ll also see in the Sidebar Menu I could have gone to Users, then Add New. Once I’m here, I could go to Add New as well.

The thing about this, I have to pick the role of the particular user. You’ll notice that we’ve got several different users who we can choose from. There’s the Administrator, the one that controls everything. However, we also can have an Editor who controls all of the text. Or we could have an Author who manages their own text; they don’t have any control over any other author. You also have Contributor, who controls just the limited amount of stuff that they create, but they can't post, and they can't put anything in the Media Library. So it’s really restrictive. Of course, you also have Subscriber, whom you don't want to have any control of the site, but they need to be logged in. As I mentioned in the Discussion video, this can be useful information, because you can allow individual subscribers to comment on posts to cut down on your moderation time.

You’ll notice, you have to put in a username and an email for this. This will notify the individual subscriber via email. This step is especially important so that they can find out their password, login, change their password, and customize their profile (similar to how you can customize yours).

One of the things about this is the username cannot be changed. So you want to be very careful about that username. It is required. I’m making an Editor here, and I’ll add an email address. And I could put my user’s name and if they’re a Contributor, what website they’re coming from.

Typically, you would just go ahead and add that new user, and it would generate a password. Let me show you the secure password it created. I’m going to make a terrible password. It’s going to make me confirm the use of a terrible password. For the sake of the video, I want to be able to log in quickly.

I’m going to add this new user.

I’m an administrator—I can see both user accounts here. I’m going to log out now, and log back in as that editor.

And you’ll notice, as an editor, I have control over posts, my media library, and pages—but I do not have any control over the settings or the appearance of the site itself.

You’ll also notice that I don’t have the Users choice in the Menu—I only have my profile. I can’t control any of the other users who are there.

But I do have control over the content—I just don’t have control over the settings or appearance of the site.

So you’re going to want to create a set of users specific to what their needs are with regard to working on your WordPress site, whenever you’re creating a team of people and it’s not just you.

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