As the blog owner, you will be given the top-level, ‘Administrator’, role in your blog. This enables you to make any changes necessary in your blog. You may, however, wish to add other users in the blog. These users can be given access levels as great as ‘Administrator’, or as low as ‘Subscriber’ (who can only read the blog).

*Please note: You will need to know the users’ my.ryerson Usernames (the part before @ryerson.ca in their email address) in order to add them as a user in your blog.

Blog user roles

Here is a brief description of the access given to each user role in the blog, from the WordPress website. We generally recommend giving students in a class blog the ‘Author’ role.

• Administrator – Somebody who can modify any aspect of the blog, the owner of the blog. CAN see all posts that are “privately” published.
  
• Editor – Somebody who can publish ‘posts’, manage all posts (even ones they did not create). These users have a similar access to ‘pages’. CAN see all posts that are “privately” published.
  
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts, including uploading images. These users have no access to create or manage ‘Pages’.
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts. Also cannot upload files (including images) to the site, nor their individual posts. Posts created by a Contributor must be Published by someone with the Administrator role. These users have no access to create or manage ‘Pages’.
• Subscriber – Somebody who can view private blog posts and pages, comment, etc. These users have no access to the blog-related features in the Dashboard, and cannot create content (beyond commenting).

Add a class of students (Instructors)

If you are an instructor running a group course blog, where the students all need to be added to the blog, you will need to get all of the students’ usernames.

The best place to get this information is from your D2L course shell for that course, as the Grades tool stores the students’ usernames.

• Be sure to select to download the ‘username’ (no other information is required).
• You need the usernames to appear one per line, with no spaces or additional characters.
• Be sure to remove any dummy students

Once you have the usernames, proceed to the ‘Adding Multiple Users at Once’ instructions below.

Add users

*Before you begin: You will need to know the users’ my.ryerson Usernames (the part before @ryerson.ca in their email address) in order to add them as a user in your blog.

Add a single user

1. Log into the Dashboard of your blog.
2. In the sidebar on the left, click the ‘Users’ heading.
3. Click ‘Add User’ from the list of options in the resulting submenu.
4. Enter the user’s my.ryerson username in the ‘Username’ field.
5. Select an appropriate role for this user to have in your blog. (See the summary of roles below.)
6. Click ‘Add User’

Add multiple users at once

Important: students in a shared class blog should *never* be given an Administrator role, as this would give them access to the private information of their classmates. We recommend the use of the ‘Author’ role.

1. Log into the Dashboard of your blog.
2. In the sidebar on the left, click the ‘Users’ heading.
3. Click ‘Add User’ from the list of options in the resulting submenu.
4. Go to the ‘Add Bulk Users’ section, in the lower half of the page.
5. Here, you can type (or paste) many usernames to be added at the same time, with the same role. Be sure to enter one username per line, and check that there are no spaces hiding before or after each username.
6. Select an appropriate role for all of these users to have in your blog. The summary of roles can be found above.
7. Click ‘Add User Bulk’

As long as the username you entered was entered correctly (with no spaces at the end), and represents a user with a currently active my.ryerson account, they should now be added to your blog!