Managing several users on a blog
Last updated : October 2018
When a blog is created, its only user account is that of the person who submitted the application to open the blog. This person is an administrator and can add other user accounts to the blog from its dashboard, via the Users > Add New menu.

If you want to add a person who already has a user account on another Hypotheses blog, use the “Add Existing User” section. Enter the e-mail address associated with their pre-existing user account and the role you want them to play in your blog.
If you want to add a person who does not yet have an account on the Hypotheses platform, use the “Add New User” section.
Fill in:
- A username: without special characters, numbers, accents or capital letters. Once chosen, the identifier cannot be modified; it can be used by the user to connect to their account and will only appear on the blog in some URLs (when you consult all the content of a given author, for example), unless you decide to use it as a public signature. The username can be, for example, the lower-case surname of the user in question;
- An e-mail address: you will need to ask the user who is concerned by the creation of the account for this address in order to ensure that it is valid. The user will have to click on a link sent to this address to validate the creation of his account;
- A role: according to the rights you want to give to the user on your blog.
The different types of users
Each role has its own set of rights, a summary of which is given below. From the least permissive to the most permissive role, you can choose:
- Subscriber: can read the articles published in the book – even those published in private mode – and comment on them if the comment settings allow it;
- Contributor: can create and edit articles, but cannot publish them; they will be put “Pending review” and must be published by a person that holds the role of Editor or Administrator;
- Author: can publish, edit and delete his own articles;
- Editor: can publish, edit and delete his own articles but also those of other users; can publish, edit and delete pages; can moderate all comments ; can manage categories ;
- Administrator: has all rights to the blog. This is the only role that can modify the appearance of the blog.
Public signatures and authors
Associating content with the right author metadata
To optimize the referencing and proper indexing of your content, it is considered a good practice to enter the name of the real author of a given content via the “Author” selector located in the “Document” tab of the Settings column of the edition interface of an article or page. Filling in this information does not have the same implications as simply entering the name of the real author at the end of a post by publishing with another user account: texts published online are browsed by robots responsible for referencing web pages, and they keep as “author” metadata this public signature, which will then be displayed as the actual author of the content in many databases, in bibliographic references, and in search engines. You can check out this article from the House of blogs to learn more about the importance of a personalized public signature.
Publishing in the name of another person
As an administrator of a blog, you can use this method to publish an article in the name of another person, if that person has a user account on that blog.
If the person already has a user account on Hypotheses but is not a user of your blog, you can add them, with their permission. To do this, go to Users > Add New > Add Existing User > enter the email address associated with their existing account on Hypotheses (that you have asked them for), and assign them a role before clicking on “Add Existing User”.
If the person does not have an account on Hypotheses, you can create an account for them via Users > Add New > Add New User. You need to enter a username (e.g. last name, preferably in lowercase, without accents, punctuation, spaces, special characters), a valid email address of the person, and a role before clicking on “Add new user”.
The optimal approach is to ask this person to set-up the account you have created for them (it will take them about 2 minutes). To do this, they will just have to click on the confirmation link for creating an account that appears in an automatic email that WordPress will have sent to the address you have entered, before connecting at least once to their Hypotheses account to set-up their profile (Users > Your profile). It is necessary that they provide at least their first and last name, and that they set the display of their public signature (“Display name publicly as”) in the format “First name Last name” or “Last name First name”. They may then never connect to the blog again, but you will be able to choose their name, as author, when publishing their content.
Publication of texts signed by multiple authors
WordPress does not allow the publication of an article by multiple authors, although this feature is regularly requested to the development teams. To fill this void, several bypass solutions are possible, including :
- Publishing with the main author’s user account and writing the name of the other authors in the text body (the “author” metadata associated with the post will therefore be the main author);
- Creating a user account with the names of all authors in the “Pseudonym” field, and setting the public signature to display this pseudonym, which will be the “author” metadata, to publish the post (which keeps all names as one name in the metadata).
Featured Image: Photo by Samuel Zeller under Unsplash license