One of the best strategies for setting up a successful and popular site is to have multiple authors and contributors for the site. WordPress.com lets you assign different roles and levels of access. The information below is taken from the WordPress.com website. (source)
Keep in mind that while WordPress.com is a great value at $18 per year for hosting and domain name registration, ads may appear at the bottom of your pages unless you pay the additional $30 per year. There are also other limitations if you don’t have their full hosting package which runs about $100 a year. For more advanced sites, a better choice of hosting would be DreamHost.
User roles determine the access level or permissions of a person authorized (invited by an Administrator) to use a WordPress.com site.
Summary
- Administrator – nothing is off limits
- Editor – has access to all posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, and links.
- Author – can write, upload photos to, edit, and publish their own posts.
- Contributor – has no publishing or uploading capability, but can write and edit their own posts until they are published
- Follower (public sites) / Viewer (private sites only) – can read and comment on posts and pages
Each user role is capable of everything that a less powerful role is capable of. (In others words, Editors can do everything Authors can do, Authors can do everything Contributors can do, and so on.)
Administrator
An Administrator has full power over the site and can do absolutely everything. Administrators can create more Administrators, invite new users, remove users, and change user roles. They have complete control over posts, pages, uploaded files, comments, settings, themes, imports, exports, other users – the whole shebang.
Nothing is off-limits for Administrators, including deleting the entire site. This is why we recommend having only one administrator per blog.
Editor
An Editor can create, edit, publish, and delete any post or page (not just their own), as well as moderate comments and manage categories, tags, and links.
Author
An Author can create, edit, publish, and delete only their own posts, as well as upload files and images. Authors do not have access to create, modify, or delete pages, nor can they modify posts by other users. Authors can edit comments made on their posts.
Contributor
A Contributor can create and edit only their own posts, but cannot publish them. When one of their posts is ready to be published, or has been revised, the Administrator needs to be notified personally by the Contributor to review it. Furthermore, once a Contributor’s post is approved and published by an Administrator, it can no longer be edited by the Contributor.
Contributors do not have the ability to upload files or images, but they can see your site’s stats.
Follower
Followers do not have any editing privileges on your site whatsoever; they are simply people who have signed up to receive updates each time you publish a new post. The only thing they can do on your site is leave comments (if you have them enabled), though they do not have to be a Follower to do so.
If your blog is public, anyone can follow it, but you can also send out invitations to specific people you’d like to share your blog with.
If your blog is private, nobody will be able to follow it unless you specifically invite them, at which point they become a Viewer.
Viewer
Viewers are users who can only view private sites. Like Followers, Viewers do not have any editing privileges. All they can do is simply read the private site they were invited to and leave comments on it (again, only if you’ve enabled them).
Note: If someone is a Follower of your public site, and then you set that site to private, they do not automatically become a Viewer. Viewers must always be specifically invited. Viewers must also sign up to follow a private site if they would like to receive updates each time you publish a new post.