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Users and Permissions

If you intend to do all the work youself, you can skip this session.

By default, WordPress allows only the owner of the blog/newsletter to make changes and add content.

The beauty of using an online blog/newsletter is to allow you to share the work, allowing other parents, adult leaders or scouts to add content.

If you add WordPress to your own damain, you can add users and set their level of access (more on that in a moment). If you make use of the WordPress.com provided site for your blog/newsletter, each of the other users will need to sign in with WordPress as a users (they don't need a blog, just a user ID from WordPress).

As the owner of the blog/newsletter, you get to decide for each individual, what their level of access is. WordPress provides several levels of access:

  • Administrator - Somebody who has access to all the administration features
  • Editor - Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people's posts, etc.
  • Author - Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
  • Contributor - Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
  • Subscriber - Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc.

(from http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities)

Anyone other than the owner who joins the blog/newsletter will be set, by default, as a subscriber.

I suggest that you do not changes this setting (new users are "Subscribers" by default) because of the tendency of any accessible area of the Internet to be filled in advertising spam. I've had several web sites severely damaged by robots attempting to change pages to replace existing content with advertising.

For each user that you add, you can set the access level. Once you add a user, you can change them to "Author" if you completely trust their ability to write clearly and directly and post appropriate material. I grant this access to my Assistant Scoutmasters and Committee members who want to post information to the blog/newsletter.

You might want to grant "Contributor" access to Parents or Scouts when you wish to edit and expand the material that you post before publishing it to the blog/website.

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