WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at [1] dougbelshaw.com... [2]

Continuing the celebration of [3] EduPress week, today’s post looks at how you can configure your shiny-new EduPress-powered blog for use by multiple users, whether it’s to allow students or colleagues (limited) access to your blog…

There are a number of situations in which you might want to give others either full access or limited access to the administrative functions of your [3] EduPress installation. To this end, [3] EduPress allows you to ascribe roles to different people and a default role to those you allow to register themselves.

Here’s a breakdown of the assignable roles in [3] EduPress:

• Administrator – can perform all possible functions in [3] EduPress. Full control.
• Editor – can create and publish content, as well as edit other people’s content.
• Author – can create, publish and edit their own content.
• Contributor – can create (but not publish) and edit their own content.
• Subscriber – can read posts/pages/comments, subscribe to newsletters, etc. but cannot create content.

As you can see, this makes [3] EduPress a powerful interactive teaching and learning tool. Students can be given Contributor status which means that their teacher can OK what they’ve written before it’s published on the Internet. Students who have proved themselves trustworthy (or older students) could be given Author status to publish without ‘vetting’, and those who take a special interest could be given Editor status to correct mistakes, clarify ambiguities, etc.

The Subscriber and Administrator functions can be used in a more traditional way. Members of staff in a department could be given Administrator status to each have full control of the blog. The Subscriber function is useful if you only want registered users to be able to post comments or even read your blog.

The assignable roles area of the [3] EduPress admin control panel is located in Users/Authors & Users:

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You have the option to Add New User and can fill in all the details for them, including their password (which, of course, they can change later..)

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Once you’ve created a user, you can assign a role to them via a drop-down menu. Access this by clicking on the Edit button to the right of the user you just created:

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For some reason, which I’ll hopefully rectify, the Submit button appears half off the screen at the top right-hand corner. It can still be clicked, however, if you know where it is!

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If you want to limit comments on your blog to those who are registered, then you need to change an option in Options/General:

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The three options shown below have the power to allow, disallow and set a default role for those who register on your blog:

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• If you want students to pre-register students who then must login to comment, then you should make sure the Anyone can register option is unchecked and the Users must be registered... option to be checked. You would have to register pupils manually in the Users/Authors & Users section.
• If you want students to be able to register themselves and then login to comment, then you should check both the Anyone can register option and Users must be registered… boxes. This would, theoretically, allow anyone on the Internet to register, however. Make sure, therefore, that the default role is set to Subscriber if you decide on this option. Otherwise, anyone could edit your blog!
• If you don’t want to limit comments to registered users, then simply leave both the Anyone can register option and Users must be registered… boxes unchecked. When commenting people will have the chance to leave their name and email address along with their comment. Whilst this does leave you open to ‘comment spam’, the Spam Karma plugin that comes with [3] EduPress should deal with most of it!

The screenshots below show what the various levels of user would see when they login.

Subscriber – just their details and the dashboard (latest news)

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Contributor – can write and manage posts, but no option to publish content:

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Author – like Contributor, but with ability to publish content:

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Editor – can write and manage own content and other users’. Can also add links:

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Administrator – full control over all functionality:

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Using a combination of the features outlined above, you should be able to use [3] EduPress to create an interactive, multi-user blog!

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