WordPress has had an extraordinary developmental life and gone through lots of major redesigns since it first showed up as yet another blogging tool, and it now is easily the most popular blogging platform in the marketplace and on the Internet. No surprise, just about everything you'd like to be able to do is well within its reach.

Adding additional users to your WordPress blog is a fine example. There's not just "add a user", but you can assign them any of six different roles behind the scenes, ranging from making them another administrator to giving them the most minimal publishing capabilities.

Let's have a look at how to add a new user to your WordPress blog...

Log in as the administrator (which you should be by default) and on the left side you'll see a bunch of menu options, most notably Users:

Click on "Users" and immediately you will see a list of existing users and, along the top of that list, the option to add a new person to the list. Kind of tricky to say, but it's the "Add New" adjacent to "Users":

Yup. Click on that. Now you'll be prompted for some of the basics: name, email addr, etc:

I strongly recommend you spend the time to enter as much information as you have. Most notably, by adding their email address, Wordpress will automatically send them the login information including the password you set for them.

Scroll down a bit and you'll see where you can set that initial password for them too:

As with all passwords, I strongly recommend a mix of upper and lower case letters, a digit or two, and some punctuation. For example, "Newton" is a bad password, but "4Newt0n?!" is a good password (and no, I'm not going to use it now that I've included it here in this post!)

Check the "Send this password to the new user by email" and scroll down just a little bit further to see the many options for their role:

I suggest "Author" for someone who is going to add new content, but for whom you want the ability to monkey with the back end to be restricted. Curious about all these roles? There's a nice explanation on the wordpress site: Understanding User Roles in Wordpress.

Everything loook god? Great. Click on "Add New User" and you're done.