As a small business owner, you may want to have multiple people responsible for updating the content on your web site.  When adding these users, you’ll want to define what role they are to take as a user and contributor to your business web site.  WordPress has 5 Roles that a user can be assigned out of the box.  There is an ability to add new roles and functions in wordpress, but right now, we’ll simply define the roles available on a new installation of WordPress.

The 5 Roles and Capabilities are:

• 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.

At a minimum, each and every site setup to utilize WordPress will have an administrator.  Based on your needs, you can add multiple users to your site to fill the roles needed.

For Example:

Lets say that you would like to have a business blog with the business owner providing the information.  However, you’d like for any content this person writes be reviewed for grammatical errors before posting.  You would assign them the role of Contributor.  This way they can add content to the site, but it must be approved before it can go live.  The individual that you would want to review those articles, and approve them for posting would be assigned the role of Editor.  This way they can review the article, make any changes needed, and publish the article to go live.

Now that we understand the roles that are available to us, lets go ahead and see how we add a user.  First, you’ll want to login to your web site, and click on the Add New link under the users section of the left menu.

Add User

Once you are on the Add New User page, you see will see a form with some basic information that needs to be completed.  The information includes:

• Username (required)
• First Name
• Last Name
• Email (required)
• Web Site
• Password (required twice)
• Send Password Option – Click the Check Box to confirm emailing of the password to the new user.
• Role

Add User Form

Complete the fields, select the role, and click Add User.  That’s it.  You’ve added a new user to your website.  Pretty easy and straight forward.