How to Give Your Designer Live Access to Your Theme
As you have probably noticed by now, I have a new theme that has been kindly provided for me by Jack of Design Farmer. There were a few technical issues upon launch and Jack asked if there was a way to access my theme live so he could fix them. Here is how I gave him access to my theme without compromising my blog security.
WordPress Users
Until yesterday I had only ever setup a single user for my blog - me, the administrator and of course that user has access to everything. I can edit the posts, manage users and edit all the technical details such as plugins and themes.
WordPress allows you to setup different users with their own username and password. I’ve always thought of this as a way of having multiple authors on a blog but it occurred to me that I could use the functionality to give Jack his own login which had access to the theme but without being able to edit the posts (not that I thought he would but that’s not the point - it’s a useful exercise!)
WordPress 2.0 Roles & Capabilities
WordPress 2.0 allows you to specify a role within your blog, such as the Administrator Role or a Subscriber Role. Each role is simply a collection of capabilities such as the ability to publish a post, edit an exiting post, switch themes and so on. This functionality is documented on the WordPress website.
However, it is not easily accessible. I had to install a plugin in order to access this functionality. I used the Role Manager Plugin to allow me to do what I wanted.
Using the Role Manager Plugin
As soon as you install the plugin you will have a bunch of additional options available to you underneath the users tab:
Clicking on the ‘Roles’ tab will bring up this new screen that allows you to edit existing roles and create new ones:
This was the first approach that I tried. I created a ‘Designer’ role and gave it the permissions that I wanted and then set Jack’s user to the Designer role but that didn’t work - when I tried to login as Jack it didn’t give him permission to access the dashboard. I’m not sure why, must have been something I did wrong.
However, there is another method and as I only needed to create one user, this is what I did. When you edit a user, in addition to assigning a role you can manually assign extra capabilities and this is what I did in the end. I left Jack in the default Subscriber role but I added the ability for him to edit and switch themes as you can see from the screen shot below:
When Jack logs in, he has a very limited Dashboard which allows him access to the Presentation tab where he can make all the edits he needs to my theme. Isn’t that cool?
Additional Uses for Roles & Capabilities
Traditionally, blogs are often a one-person affair but more commonly blogs are being run by multiple people with many authors and some are even evolving into communities rather than just one-way conversations. I even know of a paid membership site (The Immediate Edge) which is entirely powered by WordPress and I imagine the users are managed in this way.
There are many people who like to write but aren’t particularly tech-savvy and for those people, the default WordPress Dashboard may be a little overwhelming. By creating specific logins for those people that has only the access they need, it has the side effect of introducing simplicity.
I’d be interested to hear your opinions and experiences of how this functionality can and is being used on WordPress blogs.
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Chris O'Byrne
December 29, 2007
This is really helpful. I do a lot of WordPress setup and customization and this is also a good way to let some of my clients have access without opening up everything to them. Thanks!