How do I set up WordPress so a guest author can post, without giving them the keys to the kingdom (blog)?

First, what's a Guest Post? This is a common thing – and a good way to expand your reach with your audience. A Guest Post is simply a post made to your blog by another author. typically it's something they do once or possibly for a series of posts. Think of it as filling in on a talk show. 🙂 Luckily, WordPress provides the means for you to easily enable a guest post – without much fuss.

It's all about the Roles and Capabilities.

These allow you to set up a user with access to only a specific set of functions. It starts with creating a user account for your guest. You can use an existing subscriber account or create a new one in your Dashboard. Here's what to look for on the screen:

Summary of WordPress Roles:

  • Administrator – that's you and you can do anything, any where
  • Editor – can publish posts and manage posts, including posts made by others
  • Author – can publish and manage their own posts
  • Contributor – can submit and manage their own posts, but can't publish
  • Subscriber – your reader, can read comments, make comments, get news letters, etc.

You'll probably want to assign them the role of Contributor – this allows them to write and manage their posts, but they cannot publish. This reserves control over that to you. Pretty cool huh?

Use of roles makes coordinating a guest post much easier and simpler, since they can login when they're ready and do their thing, and you can approve and publish when you're ready.