I’ve started writing a Wordpress blog and now my sister wants to add some content too. Can I set her up with her own account or do we need to share my account?
Turns out that not only does WordPress support multiple user accounts, but you can specify any of a half-dozen different roles for a specific user depending on what they’ll be doing. You can be an administrator of your WordPress blog, for example, while your sister is just an author. What does that mean? You’ll be able to, for example, upgrade plugins (always important!) but your sister won’t even see that as an option in the dashboard. Or, commonly, your WordPress developer has already set themselves up as admin and you’re an editor or author yourself.
Of course, if you’re just set up as an author you won’t be able to add a new user account to your blog and will instead be required to ask your administrator / blog manager to add your sister’s account. Rather than worry about that, though, let’s go through the process and if you find a key link is missing, well, you’ll know you don’t have the right permissions!
To start out, log in to the Dashboard on your WordPress site. On the left side there (hopefully will be) a link “Users”. That should pop out a submenu with these options:
No surprise here, you want to choose “Add New” to add a new user. It pops up a pretty big form with lots of input fields:
There are a lot of fields, but they’re not all required. I would definitely encourage you to use a non-dictionary username (e.g., if your sister’s name is Susan, 4susan or susanrb is better than just susan). You’ll need an associated email address, which is critically important because WordPress is going to email her a temporary password: Without a valid email address she’ll never get it and never be able to log in.
First and Last Name can really help you keep track of everyone as you add more users too, so I’d definitely add that.
Then notice that WordPress generates its own passwords. They’re highly secure, as you can see:
Standard practice here is to make sure that “Send the new user an email about their account” box is checked, then know that they’ll have their password emailed to them without you having to be involved. That’s good!
And then we get to roles. WordPress has six roles defined, as explained in this Roles and Capabilities page (if you’re curious). Or just make your sister an author, which is defined as “somebody who can publish and manage their own posts”. Sounds good, right?
All looks good. Click on ‘Add New User’ when you’re ready and that account will be created and email will be sent out to the email address specified. Now they’ll also show up in the Users listing:
Uh oh! A user account “hackme“? Might be time to delete that one for my own peace of mind!
Fortunately that’s easy to do too: Go to this Users page and simply move the cursor over their account name area. A bunch of options will pop up:
A click and ‘Some Random Hacker Grrl’ is no longer on the users list for this wordpress blog. Not too difficult overall.
Now, good luck with your new blog!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about WordPress for quite a while. Please do check out my WordPress help area for more tutorials!
