Adding Or Promoting Users On Your Site

At UMW, we have somewhat of a unique setup when it comes to provisioning user accounts. Everyone with a Banner account can automatically have an account on our website. To activate your account, simply click the “Login” link in the footer of the website, and enter your Banner username and password. Once you’ve done so, you should be logged into WordPress.

Site Managers

Adding New Users

While you should not be adding new users to the overall system, you can add users that are already in the system to your website. To do so, login to your site’s administrative area and click Users -> Add New in the left menu. Begin typing the user’s Banner username (netID) into the “E-mail or username” box under the “Add Existing User” heading. If the user already exists within the system, their username and email address should appear in an “auto-complete” box below the text field in which you’re typing. Select that user, assign them a role, and click the “Add Existing User” button.

If the user does not come up in the auto-complete box, that means the user does not yet exist within the University WordPress system. If that is the case, please ask the user to visit the “Login” link in the footer of your site, and enter their Banner username and password to create their account. They will be automatically added as a “subscriber” on your site, at that point.

Promoting Users

If you have a user that’s already been added to your site, but you need to give them more permissions than they currently have, you can promote that user. To do so, simply go to Users -> All Users in your administrative area and locate the user in the list.

Then, place a checkmark in the box next to that user’s name; in the “Change role to…” box above the list, choose the appropriate user role; then click the “Change” button. That user will be promoted to the new role.

User Roles

There are five different roles that you might want to assign to users within your site.

  • Subscriber – Subscribers have the ability to view “private” posts and pages on your site, and to edit some of their own profile information. Other than that, being a subscriber is essentially the same as being a public user that’s not logged into the system.
  • Contributor – Contributors are allowed to create new “posts” within your site, but they cannot publish them. Instead, they can save them in the system, at which point, those posts will need to be approved by someone with more permissions. Contributors do not have permission to create or edit any pages, menu items or settings.
  • Author – Authors have the ability to create and publish new “posts”. They can also edit their own posts. As with contributors, authors do not have any permissions to manage pages, menus or settings.
  • Editor – Editors are able to create, publish and edit new posts and pages. They have permission to edit all posts and pages on the site; not just their own. Editors do not have any access to change settings within the site.
  • UMW Site Administrator – This is the user role with the most permissions within the system (outside of “super users” like the University Webmaster). These users have permission to create, publish and edit posts and pages; they have the ability to manage menus, settings and more.