Introduction to WordPress Roles

 

Roles in WordPress allow different users to have different access to things, from Subscribers which can read and comment to Administrators who can do anything. We’ll look at the default Roles, what they can do, and then look at adding additional custom roles.

Transcription

Hey folks, welcome to another HeroPress Tip of the Week. This week, we’re going to talk about roles in WordPress. If you are a single user of your site, then you are probably an administrator and have abilities to do anything to your site. But there are other options. Were right here on the WordPress documentation site. Looking at the summary of roles, and we’re going to start at the bottom actually, right here you can see there’s subscriber. A subscriber is someone who can only manage their profile so they can log into the site, they can update their own information. And one of the advantages of being a subscriber as opposed to not is that when you want to leave a comment, you don’t have to log in, it knows who you are already.

Next is contributor. This is someone who can write and manage their own posts, but cannot publish. So if you want to give access to an intern or a new employee or something, and you want to be careful of what they’re publishing, you can give them access to write, and edit, and all of that, but they can’t actually publish.

Next is author,

Next is administrator which can do anything.

And then last is called Super Admin. And you’ll only run into this on a multi site network. And Super Admin is like administrator, but across multiple sites.

So I want to show you where you might see these here in WordPress, so I’m gonna the Users page. And if I go to add new down here at the bottom is rule and you can set a new user to anything you need.

So now let’s take a look at where you might see these in WordPress. There’s the Users page and you can add new at the bottom, you can choose what role a new user might get. Also, if you edit someone you can see their role…

also, if you edit someone other than yourself, you can see their role and if you are an administrator, you can change their role.

One last thing about roles. You can create new ones. You have to give them the permissions that they need. And so you could make a hybrid of a contributor or an editor. Often, plugins like E commerce plugins will create roles for inventory management and sales management and things like that. And those people can only manage those things. So you might end up with a site with many more roles than the default.

But that’s okay. There’s no harm in having many and each one has its own purpose. I hope you find it useful.