Are you thinking about making someone a guest blog author on your wordpress blog? This question recently came up and although I have made folks guest bloggers by inserting their articles I never gave anyone access to my site to be a guest blogger.

So, I decided to re-check the roles and capabilities for users on the WordPress.org platform. Here is a quick summary.

Wow, we should have more discussions like this, Thanks Wendy, Heidi and Claudia

Working with training blog teams for work I have made some of them Editors and others Admin
I am including the list of levels in this email and their access level. There is a caution, however, about giving folks levels that allow them to see email addresses from folks who submit comments. That includes EDITOR AND ADMINISTRATOR LEVELS

• When you make someone a CONTRIBUTER 
•  they can:
  
  Upload files
• Write/edit/manage their own posts and save as a draft to await administrator approval. THEY CANNOT PUBLISH THEIR OWN POSTS
  This appears to be a good  level for folks who are new authors on your site. They can post directly to the site but your administrators must approve the drafts and publish. You can also control the timing of the posts according to your editorial calender.

When you make someone an AUTHOR they can:

Do all the things a CONTRIBUTOR AND AUTHOR can do PLUS they can moderate comments, manage categories, manage all links for blog roll, edit pages,edit other folks posts as well as read and edit private posts.
Did I hear someone out there say, “I did not know you could make posts private”. Well yes, you can, but that is another discussion. You can also make them password protected. Or use a cool plug in called EXCLUDE to omit that page from the search engines. I use strategies like this a lot to send folks to a page after a workshop. It is so cool to say “here is your special password.”

Finally,the ADMINISTRATOR,
They can do everything. But caution about making too many Chiefs. They also can change themes, mess with your code and change passwords.
Hope this
helps