Let’s first define the people who can be involved in running a blog.

Readers:

In this blog I call the people who can read it and comment on posts “readers”. Who can be a reader depends on the Privacy settings, which can be changed only by an administrator. The options are:

Open access – anyone in the world

Community – anyone with a University Login

Private – yourself or a nominated group

Users:

Users are people who can do more than just read the blog or comment. What they can do depends on what “role” they are given. WordPress has five pre-defined roles Aministrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. In a network like ours, there is also a super-administrator. The roles are defined as follows:

• Super Admin – Someone with access to the blog network administration features controlling the entire network
• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users’ posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish them
• Subscriber – Somebody who can only manage their profile

Only Administrators can add other users. How you choose roles is up to you, and will depend on your departmental organisation.

All roles except subscriber allow you to create posts.

To help you use this blog I have adopted some icons to indicate the roles appropriate to the content of each post or page:

If you are a contributor, follow the Authors icon, but remember you cannot publish your posts.