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  • Managing WordPress Users
  • Managing WordPress Users

Video:

 

 

Transcript:

In this video, we're going to talk about how to manage users in WordPress. If you're only running 
a blog for yourself, and there's only one of you, then you don't really need to worry about it too 
much. You shouldn't really have any other users, though. There is the option to have subscribers. 
We'll take a look at how to manage users and the different possible roles they may have in the 
admin on the left. Under users, you can view all users and right now we only have one and it's me. 
User information is sometimes rendered on the front of the website as well. For example, here's our 
news post about movies in the park and it says written by Topher and it's a link. If you click it 
then you get to go to an archive of all the posts by that user. So it's worth remembering that some 
of this information actually gets shown on the front of the site. Now when you're looking at the 
user archive in the admin area, you can see how many posts that person has written, their role, 
their email address, their name if they've entered one and then this is called a Gravatar. It's 
related to gravatar.com and it's used only if that user has an account at gravatar.com using the 
same email that is here. From right here, you can change the role to any of one of these and we'll 
talk about those in a few more minutes. You could bulk delete users and then you can search users on 
a site. With many users, the search can be very useful. Let's edit this user and look at some of the 
options on a per user basis. You can disable the visual editor when writing. I don't know why you'd 
want to do this but some people simply prefer HTML. Then there's an admin color scheme and simply by 
clicking you can change the color scheme of the admin area. I never do I just like the default. Then 
you can enable keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation and there's a link here to the codex. That 
helps you know what can be done and then there's the spot toolbar at the top. You can optionally 
show it or not show it. By default, it shows for everyone when they're logged in, some people simply 
don't like it. Then we get to personal information. You'll note that I don't have written in here a 
first name or last name and that's okay, that works, but I'm going to go ahead and do it and then 
there's a nickname required. I'm going to make mine a little more readable and then display name 
publicly as and you can choose from any of the above fields. I'm simply going to choose nickname. 
There's contact info, an email address is required and in fact users can use their email address to 
log in now. They don't have to use their username, that's one of the reasons that email addresses 
are so important. You may never have two users with the same email address, the website is optional. 
Some themes put it on the front of the website, some don't and the same goes for biographical 
information. Here we have profile picture. WordPress grabs the profile picture from Gravatar, if it 
can, but, if it can't, you can set your own. Here we can generate a new password. It's possible to 
be logged into this site from two different places maybe you logged in at work and left it logged in 
and when you get home want to log it out. You can simply click this button and it will take care of 
it for you. Now, you'll note that it didn't talk about role on this page. That's because you may not 
change your own role, you can only change it for others, even if you are an administrator. Now let's 
take a look at roles. I'm going to click add new and required is you to name an email and then 
there's this non-required information: a password, then the option to send the user an email about 
their account and then here we have roles and roles are very important. Let's talk about those. An 
administrator has full power to do everything. They can manage plugins, themes, content, users, 
everything an editor can do. Everything with content, which means they cannot change plugins, themes, s
ettings or manage tools but they can do anything with anyone's content because they're the editor. 
An author can do anything with their own content, so they can write and publish and unpublish etc. 
A contributor can write but not publish. It must be reviewed by the editor or the administrator. 
Lastly a subscriber can't do anything with any content. There's very little they can do, besides 
change their own name and their own password. What they can do is be logged in to your website and 
have the website know about them. This is particularly useful if they comment a lot because then 
they don't have to put in their user. Nope, they don't have to put in their name, their web address, 
etc. They just comment. Also logged in users when they comment are rarely moderated. Usually they're 
known users because the site owner sees the account being created and if he doesn't like them he 
simply deletes the account. New rules may be invented and added to WordPress at any time and this is 
very common with e-commerce. When you install WooCommerce or easy digital downloads you may end up 
with an inventory manager and a sales manager. These roles allow someone to log in and deal only 
with e-commerce materials, never seeing any other content or settings or things like that. This can 
happen with just about any plugin. If you get a photography plug-in you might end up with a variety 
of other rules. If you run a large newspaper with WordPress, you might end up with more rules than 
the ones that it comes with. If you run a site with multiple people using it on a regular basis, 
think about what role they should have, what they need and what they do. Make sure that they have 
the right rule, otherwise they end up frustrated and start believing that WordPress can't do the 
things that they need to do, simply because their permissions are wrong. So feel free to make 
multiple users for your website think carefully about passwords. Make sure they have a good password 
and think carefully about rules and make sure that they're able to do what they need to do on your 
site.