In our last post about the right theme for web based help with WordPress, we looked at the features we wanted and some of the possible themes we could use. The Mantra theme offers a range of features that can help us select the colors, fonts, and layout. However, we will need external plugins to fulfill some other needs to create a good web based help and fine-tune WordPress for our needs. Setting up WordPress for user documentation is not that easy, but neither is any other CMS. However, this is a one-time effort and the time you are spending now will reap rich rewards later. Our goal throughout this experiment is to make the implementation as simple as possible, and use, simpler. To make things easier and give ourselves a concrete direction, let us wear the planning cap again and see what we need to do in what order.
Documentation Team
The first thing that we need to do after we install WordPress and identify a theme is to set up the CMS for use, that is, define the rules for the CMS users. Our users here, as discussed in the earlier post, are writers, technical experts, editors, and administrators. Let us now define our team members based on this prior discussion.
- Writers: Raj, Jane
- Editor: Omar
- Technical Expert: Kate
- Information Architect: Cho
- Administrator: Maya
Roles and Permissions
Now that we have our team ready, we need to add them to the WordPress installation and assign permissions. We know that WordPress provides a few roles, by default; however, we have additional roles such as the information architect that cannot fit into any of the available roles. We want the information architect to have access to add and edit categories and tags, but not the permission to edit or publish a post, and this behavior is difficult to specify using the default roles. Standard WordPress installation and the Mantra theme does not offer any interface to assign permissions to different roles or create new roles. Therefore, to get this functionality, we will install the User Role Editor plugin. The plugin allows you to create new user roles and assign or edit permission for each role and control activity for each user type.
After you install the plugin, open the User Role Editor page listed in the Users section on the WordPress menu. The first part of the settings allow you to edit permissions for the default WordPress roles. As you scroll down, the second part of the settings help you create new roles and also define new capabilities.
For the purpose of this post series, we will now assign following permissions for each user role and add a new role wherever necessary.
Team Member Role PermissionsWriter or Author Author
- Edit posts
- Delete Posts
- Read
- Upload Files
Editor Editor
- Delete others’ pages and posts
- Delete pages and posts
- Delete published pages and posts
- Edit others’ pages and posts
- Edit pages and posts
- Edit published pages and posts
- Moderate comments
- Publish pages and posts
- Read
- Upload Files
Technical Expert Tech Editor
- Edit others’ pages and posts
- Read
Architect Architect
- Manage categories
- Manage Links
Administrator Administrator
- All options except Editor’s
For example, let us add a new role for our Architect, Cho.
After we add the new role, we will now define what the person in this role can do.
After you define the user roles, it is time to add users to the WordPress installation. You can do this using the Add New page under Users in the WordPress menu. At the end of this step, you will have the complete team ready and listed on your Users page.
So, now we have the team ready and set up for work. However, before the writers begin documenting the tool, we have additional tasks such as identifying the topics, defining the architecture, the Help layout, and the page design. We will discuss this and much more in our future posts.
So keep visiting and add your thoughts and comments about using WordPress for user documentation.