ADDING FEATURES TO YOUR BLOG - WordPress in Depth - page 144

II

• Contributor or Author —Decides whether to let people who write posts publish their own posts,
which makes them Authors (which is what we recommend), or just a Contributor who has to
wait for someone to publish posts for them (which, if you're going to be controlling, should be
you, we suggest).
• Editor/Administrator/Blog owner —Usually the blog owner is the sole superuser and is the only
one with access to administration; IOHO (that's In Our Humble Opinion, not a misspelling of
Ohio), this is easier for other “users” (as WordPress calls them) and for you as well.

Why do we recommend obliterating the Contributor versus Author division and just making anyone
who writes posts an Author, able to publish their own posts?
There are three main reasons:
• Simplicity —A great attraction of blogging is simplicity. Don't add unnecessary structure.
• Timeliness and informality —Two big and related plusses of most blogs are timeliness and
informality; timeliness is lost directly if a separate publishing step is needed, and informality
tends to go due to self-editing by a self-conscious Contributor, or directly, when you yield to the
temptation to edit in your opinions, approach, or wording instead of the original author's.
• Editability —It ain't print; if you don't like something, you can always change it postpublication.
If you're quick, you can make the change before many people see the original. If you aren't
quick, think of what you would have given up in timeliness by holding the piece until you could
get around to it.

As for administration, it's a lot easier to have one administrator (in the broad sense of the term, not
the specific WordPress role). When there's more than one, you can feel a kind of seasickness as you
wonder if the ground (that is, what your blog “is” and where
things are) has shifted under your feet.
The usual solution to this is to institute a change-control
process with proposed changes, permissions, and approvals,
but now we're talking a lot of overhead. Better to give away
one important piece of power—allowing users to publish their
own contributions directly—and keep the rest for yourself.

note
For an impressively detailed
description of the roles available
for WordPress “users,” visit
http://codex.wordpress.org/
Roles_and_Capabilities.

Inviting Users and Assigning Roles
Bringing new users—that is, of course, people with administrative capability—into your WordPress
blog is easy, but only if each of the people involved already has a WordPress account. Follow these
steps:

1. If you plan to add a new user, ensure they have a WordPress account and that you have their
email address handy. Anyone can get a WordPress account at www.wordpress.com.

2. In the Administration area, under the Users menu in the left column, click Authors and Users.
The Users page appears, as shown in Figure 7.1.