How to Create and Manage WordPress Users

wordpress-users Most small websites have a single admin user that is created when you do the install.

However there are some scenarios were you will need additional users, and in some case 100s of additional users e.g

You have several blog authors
You have a membership site
You want to restrict who can comment on your blog
You have more than one site administrator.

In this tutorial I want to cover the basics of WordPress user management so that you can confidently setup your own user management scheme.

What You will Learn?

How to create users
WordPress User Roles and what they mean
How to Allow users to Register themselves.

Creating New Users

New users can be created either:

Manually by the administrator or
By the Subscribers themselves

Creating Users and assigning Roles.

To manually create a new user go to Users>Add User

A New user screen appears where you enter the user name,email address and password (required fields).

new-user-screen

New users are given the subscriber role by default, but you can change it while creating them or once they have been created.

Passwords

Although you assign the user a password when you create them they can change their password once they have logged in.

It is normal to send the user an email with the password by enabling this option.

User Roles

WordPress users can be assigned to various roles depending on what task they need to do.

WordPress has 5 default roles. They are:

Administrator – somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site.
Editor – somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users.
Author – somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.
Contributor – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.
Subscriber – somebody who can only manage their profile.

Note: The WordPress codex has more details on exactly what these roles can do.

Upon installing WordPress, an Administrator account is automatically created, and for most sites this will be the only account.

Creating a New Admin User

An admin user called admin is created by default but it is strongly advised that you create a new admin user and delete the old one.

Always check that the new admin user works as expected before deleting the existing one.

Allowing Users to Create Their Own Account

In many cases you don’t want to have to manually add new users, but instead you want the new users to be able to create their own account.

You can accomplish this by enabling the Anyone can register option

The setting is controlled under Settings>General

registration

If you do enable registration then the default role is subscriber.You should not change this unless you really understand what you are doing.

If you are running a membership site then registration is necessary.

If you are going to allow comments, then you might can also restrict comments to registered users.

However for most small business sites/blogs you shouldn’t allow users to register.

Managing Existing Users

To manage existing users go to Users>All users

The can view all users or users with a particular role.

You can manage users in bulk by checking the check boxes. However you can really only delete the users or change their role in bulk mode.

You can edit the properties of individual users by clicking on the edit link under the user.

This you would use to change a users password,email address or contact details etc.

Contacting Subscribers/Users

Although you have the email address of all registered users WordPress doesn’t provide an easy way of contacting them via email.

To do that you will need to add a third party plugin or export the email addresses and import them into a Mailing list system.

Allowing Simple User Login

Access to the WordPress login page is via the URL domainname/wp_login.php.

To allows users/subscribers to easily login to WordPress you can enable the Meta Widget.

There are also several plug-ins like theme my login which will make the login and registration look more professional.

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