Who is Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber

Specially, if you have self-hosted WordPress blog, you might have seen that WordPress provides different options to users and define their role according to their contribution to the blog. If you are a newbie, you might have mess with these terms about who is Contributor, Author, Editor, Subscriber and Administrator. All these looks same but are not.

If you run a single author blog and is only who posts articles on the blog you may think that you don’t need to learn all about these things but you should. If you run a multi-author blog, you might have seen that all the users on the blog have their some kind of role on the blog whether they are Contributor, Author, Editor, Subscriber or Administrator. Administrator is super-power among all and has all rights to do anything on the blog. He can remove and change user’s role, delete any posts. He has the rights which usually other members don’t have.

So, let take a look who are they and what is their role on the blog or website:-

 Different types of users and their roles on the blog:-

1. Subscriber:-

Subscriber is the one who has no right at all on the blog. He can only login to blog and read the posts. He can’t remove anything or can’t do any activity on the blog.

2. Contributor:-

Contributor can

i. Write/edit their own posts

ii. Delete their own unpublished posts.

3. Author:-

Authors has all the rights that a contributor has. Along with these he can,

i. Edit their own published posts

ii. Delete their own published posts

iii. Upload media files including pictures, videos etc. to their own posts.

iv. Publish their own unpublished posts.

4. Editor:-

Editor can do everything that an author can do. Along with these he can,

i. Manage Categories and tags. Can do any modification

ii. Can approve or disapprove comments

iii. Manage links on the blog

iv. Edit, Publish, or delete other user’s posts

v. Create, Edit and Publish Pages also

vi. Read all private posts and pages.

5. Administrator:-

Administrator has all the rights of the blog and almost can do anything. If your blog is single-user blog, you are the administrator. For a quick view you can

i. Edit Anything on the blog

ii. Create more administrator.

iii. Change user’s role or delete them.

iv. Update WordPress to newer version

v. Install plugins and themes and update them

vi. Configure widgets and plugins

vii. Delete entire Website.

viii. Perform other administrative tasks.

So, I recommend you to have only one administrator per blog. If you allow guest posting, allow their roles to contributor only. So that they can post articles only. Bad peoples usually try to register themselves as user on your blog. So, before you get into trouble, please uncheck the option of “Anyone can Register” in General tab under Settings on deshboard.

Thanks friend.