WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Allowing New User Registration

As you can see in Table 4-1, each user level has a different set of capabilities. In Book III, Chapter 3, we discuss the General Settings in the WordPress Dashboard, in which you set the default role for users who register on your Web site. Keep the default role set to Subscriber because when you open registration to the public, you don't always know who's registering until after they register — and you don't want to arbitrarily hand out higher levels of access to the settings of your Web site unless you know and trust the user.

When users register on your Web site, you, as the Administrator, get an e-mail notification (sent to the e-mail address you set on the General Settings page), so you always know when new users register, and you can then go into your Dashboard and edit the user to set his role any way you see fit.

New users can register on your site only after you enable the Anyone Can Register option on the General Settings page within your Dashboard (Book III, Chapter 3). If you don't have it enabled, then users see a message on the Registration page that tells them registration isn't allowed, as shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1: The message to users that registration isn't allowed.

By the way, the direct URL for registration on a blog that ...