Adding and managing users

- Once your site is up and running, you probably want to either add new users, or manage existing users, or maybe remove users that have been registered to your site. All of this is done from the Users view within the WordPress Admin Panel, and you find it by going to the Main Menu here and selecting Users. The default view here is an Index View just like you have with Posts and Pages and everything else where you get a full list of all the registered users on your site. Right now you can see I have two users. I have the one I created when I set up my site, that's the one with the username morten and my full name and email and everything else.

It's currently set to an Administrator Role, and it has three published Posts. In addition, I have another user with the username monster and the name monster monstere that I created previously in a course just to show you that it's possible to switch the author of a post after you've created it. Now I want to show you how to add new users to your site. This can be done either from this index view by clicking the Add New button or from the WordPress Admin Panel Menu by going to Users and clicking Add New.

From here, you have to set up a username for the new user, an email address, and then you can choose if you want to fill out the First Name and Last Name fields so I'm just going to do that, and you can also add a website if you want to do that. Once the information is set up, go to the bottom and choose what Role you want this user to have. Here you can choose from Subscriber to Contributor to Author to Editor to Administrator. So, first I want to set this user as a Subscriber.

Now technically the Password will be auto-generated by WordPress and then sent to this new user by email, but I'm going to open this and see what the password is. So here you can see the password, I'll copy it, and if you want to, you can also go and change that password if you want to provide a simpler one, and then I'll click Add New User. Now the user angela has been added to my site. You can see the email address, the name, and you can see that her current role is as a Subscriber. Now I'm going to open a new browser window in Incognito Mode so that I can login as this new user.

Here I'm going to put in the username and password and Login, and once logged in you'll see because this user is a Subscriber, the only thing she can do is change her own profile information. So here you have the same information. She can go in and change her Display name publicly as. She can change her password, add biographical information and so on, but that's the extent of her current powers on your site. Now I can go in as the Administrator and change her Role, so I can go into Edit Angela.

I'll go down here to Role and change her to a Contributor first. Update the user, go back to my Incognito window and reload, and you'll see now she has the ability to go to Posts, and here you can see the existing Posts and view them, but you can't do anything with them, and you can also add a new post, but when you do so, you can't add any media items, and you also can't add a featured image. So as you can see, adding and editing users within this panel is really easy and changing the roles of those users is also really easy.

So if you have a user, and you want to upgrade that user to a different role, you can just go to that particular user, change their role, and then that will take effect immediately, and they'll get fewer or more options in the login panel. However, there are situations where you may want to remove a user from your system as well. That could be because you added someone in, and then you don't want them to be in the site any more, or it could be because you accidentally added someone you don't want to be in your site, or because someone registered, and you don't want them to be registered on your site. In that case, you have to take special care to make sure they don't already have published posts, because if they do, you need to re-attribute those posts to an existing user.

So here's the process of deleting an existing user. I'm going to delete this monster user here, and when I do so, it'll ask me, "What do you want to do with the content "owned by this user?" You can either choose to "Delete all content," meaning you'll delete all the posts published by this user, or you can choose to "Attribute all the content to" and existing user within your system, for example, me. So if you click "Confirm Deletion," you'll notice all those posts are now re-attributed to me instead. Now this brings up an important question, what do you do if you have a user on your site that has created content in the past, but you want to either revoke their access to the site, or they don't want to contribute to the site any more, but you still want to keep their profile on your site.

Well, the simple answer is, go into their user profile and change two things. Change their Role from whatever Role it is, either Author, Editor, or Administrator, to Subscriber. That way they will no longer have access of anything even if they get into the site. Secondly, generate a new password, but don't send that password to the user. That way, the account will continue to exist in your site and all the posts that were created by the account will still be attributed to that particular person, however, that person will not be able to log in because they don't have their password, and if they choose to login anyway, they will only have Subscriber status.

Of course, there is also some instances where a user might want to be removed from your site entirely, and if that's the case, then you need to delete the user and re-attribute the content to another user in your site.