The WordPress publishing system allows for multiple user accounts and administrative privileges. Your setup already includes a user account for the adviser.
User Account Roles
- Administrator: Somebody who has access to all the administration features, including comment moderation, design options, widgets, menus, user accounts, galleries, and polls. *This is the only user role that has the power to design the website.
- Editor: Somebody who can publish all articles, manage articles, as well as manage other people’s articles, and moderate comments. *Does not have the ability to design.
- Author: Somebody who can publish and manage their own articles only. *Does not have the ability to design.
- Contributor: Somebody who can write and manage their own articles but cannot publish articles. A contributor can only submit their own articles for review. An Administrator or Editor can then publish those articles. *Does not have the ability to design.
- Subscriber: Essentially does not have access to the site in any meaningful way. A Subscriber is somebody who can read approved comments on stories, make comments on stories, or receive news letters, etc. *Does not have the ability to design.
Add User Accounts
- Click Add New under the Users tab on the left navigation bar in the WordPress dashboard.
- Select a role for the user.
- Complete the new user fields - Type in a username, first and last name, and email address. You can leave the website field blank.
- We recommend giving your new users their login information directly, as we've found the automated email option doesn't always land in student email addresses.
- To create a specific password for a user, click the Generate New Password button and type in a unique password. If your chosen password isn't very strong, you can select "Accept Weak Password".
- Click the Add User button.
- Confirm it accepted your new user at the top of the page. You'll see "User Added/Updated".
- Repeat for each user account.
Deleting User Accounts
When students graduate or no longer are part of the staff, you'll want to remove their ability to login to the site. You can do this in two ways: 1) Changing their user role to Subscriber or 2) Deleting their account.
Changing them to Subscriber is the fastest way to remove their access and you can do so by clicking into their user account and changing the user role.
If you've done this for a few years and your Subscriber user list has gotten really long, it's OK to delete these accounts BUT be sure not to delete their content!
When you choose to delete a user it will bring you to a new page that asks you if you're sure and what you'd like to do with the content associated to that user. Always choose to attribute their content to another user (usually the adviser account). This will retain their content on the site and will not affect how that content is attributed or seen on the live site; it only changes how it's sorted in the backend of your site.
Changing Permission Levels
We recommend keeping permission levels as is, however, if ever you want to finetune certain capabilities, you can download a User Roles plugin. We won't be able to provide any technical support for plugins like these, but they should each come with instructions. They also may not completely integrate with SNO.