Adding and Managing Users

Only site administrators can add user accounts and assign user roles for authors, editors, and other administrators. Here’s what you need to know about users and roles.

Largo relies on the standard WordPress method of managing users and roles. There’s good WordPress documentation on Users and Roles, but here’s a summary:

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

With news sites hosted by INN, there will be one or more Administrator(s) at the news organization who will be responsible for setting up the site. This includes adding other users with different roles as needed.

Adding Users

In the dashboard go to Users > Add New. If your site is hosted as a single WordPress site, you’ll see the basic Add New User screen:

If your site is hosted as a multisite WordPress site, you’ll see an additional option to Add Existing User:

Why Would You Need to Add an Existing User?

In a multisite WordPress installation, all users in all the sites are part of the WordPress user database for that installation. This doesn’t mean all users have access to all the sites; each user has access only to the site or sites they’ve been given a user role in the individual site dashboard.

Let’s say that Jane, who has the email address jane@example.org and username ‘jane’, has a role of Editor for ‘Site A’ in the multisite installation. She has no role in ‘Site B’ and cannot log in there until added by an Administrator of Site B. However, Jane is technically an existing user, not a new user, in the multisite installation. You’ll know this because if you try to add Jane as a new user using the email address jane@example.org or username ‘jane’, WordPress will give you a nice error message saying that the username and/or email address already exists:

In this case, you use the Add Existing User fields to add Jane to your individual site.

Next Stop: Theme Options

Next, we’ll dive into the Appearance section of the dashboard and how to set up your home page layout, branding, navigation, social media links, and other Largo features that transform WordPress into a complete news and storytelling platform.