Roles and permissions

WordPress is an excellent tool for collaborative publishing, but assigning roles appropriately will help you manage what’s getting published on your site.

The role settings below allow a site admin to manage who can create and publish content and to what degree they can do this without moderation. We strongly suggest that student, or non-unimelb users be set up as Contributor accounts. This way, you have a chance to moderate the content on the site, which is ultimately your responsibility.

This simple summary provides an overview of the user role capabilities on our WordPress sites.

1. Subscriber – can read comments and write comments and login to read protected content.
2. Contributor – can write own posts but can’t publish them; instead they are submitted for review.  An administrator or editor then reviews and publishes their posts. Use this for Students who contribute to your site.
3. Author – can upload files plus write and publish own posts.
4. Editor – is able to publish posts/pages, manage posts/pages, upload files, moderate comments as well as manage other people’s posts/pages.
5. Administrator – can do everything including complete power over posts, pages, plugins, comments, choice of themes, imports, settings, assign user roles and are even able to delete the blog.

If you are an administrator, you can add an existing user to a role on your site through the Users screen of the dashboard. More about user accounts here.