In this post I will share with you Easiest Way to Allow Guest Authors to Directly Post their material directly into your WordPress site.
Step 1. Change User Roles through General Settings
In General Settings you see two things that can easily be changed to grant a guest author the permission to submit their material directly into your WordPress site:
Changing the Membership to ‘Anyone can register’ by checking the box you are allowing people to have a User Role within your site.
The New User Default Role offers 5 options for you to choose: Subscriber, Editor, Contributor, Author, and Administrator. We could discuss what each of these 5 roles do but for the purpose of allowing someone to upload content directly into your site to guest post and still protect User Role capabilities you will want to choose Subscriber role on this page. You can then further change their roles within the User Role Editor plugin.
Important: NEVER allow someone Administrator or Author Role unless you want to grant someone the ability to publish without your review AND change settings, plugins, etc. Pretty much you’d be giving them carte blanche of your entire site. YOU should be the only Administrator for your site. Period.
2. Change User Roles by installing User Role Editor plugin
Install the User Role Editor plugin and then follow these simple steps.
1. Like we discussed above you will want your General Settings > Membership and New User Default Role to be set to look exactly like below (shown by arrows)
2. Then go to Users > All Users and find the person whose guest post you are wanting to grant permission to upload material into your site. Hover over their name and choose ‘Capabilities’.
This screen will appear:
Your screen should look exactly like this for the ‘Subscriber’ role. Only ‘read’ should be checked. Why? Because once you allow anyone to subscribe to your site you will be allowing ANYONE. That means that any joe-schmoe in the wide world web can subscribe and you don’t want to grant anyone with malicious intent to be able to do anything malicious! Okay? Ok.
But this is about the Easiest Way to Allow Guest Authors to Directly Post so I’m going to assume you’ve had a conversation with the author about guest blogging on your site and so you want to grant them permission to upload their content and images into your WordPress site. This is what you do on an individual User Role basis.
You will want to change their User Role permission to Contributor with these items now checked:
See how these roles of ‘Subscriber’ and ‘Contributor’ changed? The Contributor role allows someone the viewing capability of all draft posts and pending posts, the Add New post capability and Upload Media capability. Then they can submit a pending document that you can then go in and approve for Publish or Schedule or whatever you choose.
They DO NOT have the cabability to send a draft to schedule or publish, to view plugins, or make any administrator changes. So important to protect those roles! By chosing the bare bones check boxes above you and they will achieve exactly what you are after – simply uploading their content into your site and nothing more.
Occasionally you will get communication from your guest author that they now cannot see anything on the site or that they are receiving this notification when they log in: “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page”.
This is becuse the ‘read’ section is unchecked. Simply checking ‘read’ will regrant them permission.
I love this plugin because it allows me to grant more or less permission as to what they can see, etc. according to their User Roles. Once they submit their draft you can go in and edit or approve and YOU can publish the material according to your schedule.
Hope you enjoyed this quick tip on the Easiest Way to Allow Guest Authors to Directly Post.
Visit Katie at www.FruitfulVineWife.com where you can catch the occasional guest blogger and where she blogs about flourishing and floundering moments in marriage, motherhood, womanhood and natural living.