[s3video s3url=”moderating-users.mp4″ width=”800″ height=”480″ /]
A WordPress user is basically anyone who holds some kind of role on your website.
You can see the various roles that people can have on your site by clicking on Users in the left navigation. This is where you’ll see a list of any users on your blog.
You can see the different roles that a user can have, by clicking on the dropdown at the top of the list of users. You’ll see the following 5 roles available, listed from most involved, to least involved:
Administrator: This is you. No one else should ever be given the role of administrator. This role has 100% total control over every aspect of your site… even the ability to delete the entire site.
Editor: This user can do anything related to content on your blog… they can edit, add, or remove any posts, pages, tags, categories, media, or comments.
Author: This user can publish articles on your blog, and they can edit their own posts. They cannot edit posts by other people.
Contributor: Similar to an author, but they cannot actually do any publishing. They can write (or revise) posts for your blog, and they can even do it from within the Dashboard, but they cannot hit the publish button… an admin must do that for them.
Subscriber: This is someone who follows your blog. They do not have any other permissions.
As the admin, you have the ability to add new users (with the role that you choose), and manage existing ones. To add a new user, go to Users > Add New.
Under Users > Your Profile, you’ll find the user settings for YOU. Here you can control how the Dashboard looks to you (such as the color scheme), and you can also update things like your email address, etc.
One very important thing you’ll find on this page, is the setting for the Visual Editor. The Visual Editor is an editor you’ll use when writing posts and pages (see the video for what I’m talking about). This editor allows you to write your posts in a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) mode, instead of needing to write HTML code (which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, and is the language that internet browsers understand).
This setting says, “Disable the visual editor when writing,” and you’ll want to make sure this remains unchecked. Otherwise, you will need to write all of your future posts and pages in code!
