Nonprofit WordPress

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A Free Manual for Nonprofits

  • About
  • Search
  • WordPress Basics
    • What is WordPress?
    • Creating Content
  • Types of Content
    • Pages
    • Posts
    • Media Items
  • Content Management Basics
    • Write for the Web
    • The Perils of Poor Formatting
    • Help People with Disabilities
    • Linking to External Sites
    • Linking Within Your Site
    • Adding Images
    • Adding Documents
    • Adding Videos
  • Content Management Mastery
    • Editor Tips and Tricks
    • Linking to Email Addresses
    • Linking Within a Page
    • Redirecting Links
  • Administering Your Site
    • The Admin Bar
    • Managing Users
    • Managing Menus
    • Backing Up the Site
    • Updating Your Software

Managing Users

Advice on users sharing logins

Don’t let them.

If reasonably possible, every person who needs to log into the site should have a private login. Why? Doing this lets you…

  • give them a Role that matches their needs
  • keep track of who edited what and, if you have questions about an edit, ask the right person
  • remove their account if they’re no longer associated with your nonprofit

Managing logins

You manage users through the Users menu:
menu option - users

The All Users option will let you edit existing users or add new ones.

Username (login) and “friendly” name

Every user must have a Username to log in (e.g., “pstar”).

Optionally and separately, you can specify a friendlier First Name and Last Name (e.g., “Patrick” and “Star”).

Always provide these optional “friendly” names. Sometimes WordPress will show the username instead—for example in article bylines—and it doesn’t look professional to credit an article to a writer with a name like “pstar”.

Role (security level)

A user’s role determines how much that user is able to do in managing the site.

Themes and plugins can change the list of available roles, but the standard WordPress roles are all most organizations will need. From highest capabilities to lowest they are:

  • Administrator: can do anything on the administrative menu.
  • Editor: can publish and manage pages, including other peoples’ pages.
  • Author: can edit and publish their own pages.
  • Contributor: can edit their own pages but not publish them.
  • Subscriber: can only log in and manage their own profile.

In general, give people the lowest level of privileges that will let them do their job. Giving someone a role that’s higher than they need:

  • needlessly clutters their menu with options they won’t (or shouldn’t) use
  • gives them access to options where they could accidentally damage or even shut down the site

For these reasons, even the site’s overall administrator might want to have a second, non-Administrator level login for routine content editing.

Security warning

To give you flexibility in formatting content, it’s possible to enter HTML and other web code into certain fields and screens. An unscrupulous user could use this ability to maliciously modify the system’s appearance or function.

For this reason, only give these access levels to trusted users. For those who can create content but not publish it, carefully review their work before publishing it.

Creative Commons License
Nonprofit WordPress by Andrew Giesler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://nonprofitwordpress.info.