Choosing the access settings for your blog

The following information will help you to identify the access settings for your blog – Who needs to be able to see your blog? and Who needs to be able to contribute to your blog?

Be clear about roles

When you establish a blog, you need to be clear about:

who you want to be able to see your blog and the comments posted to your blog. This is the blog visibility.
who you want to be able to post content and comments on your blog, and who may help you manage the blog. These are the writing (also called contributing) settings

The standard combination of visibility and writing settings is for Deakin blogs to be visible to the world (anyone) with writing/contributing restricted to specific Deakin users who are manually added to the blog.

Other common options are:

Visible only to Deakin users (staff and students), with writing/contributing restricted to specific Deakin users
Visible to a Deakin work group or work area, with writing/contributing restricted to either a few people in that group, or available to everyone in that group

Visibility

Visibility of your blog refers to people being able to see and read your blog pages and posts, as well as being able to see comments published to the blog. Setting the visibility of your blog does not define who can contribute to/post to your blog.

I want my blog to be visible to:	How is this done?	What are the administrative overheads?
The world – anyone can see and read the blog	This is the default setting for blogs on blogs.deakin.edu.au	None
Deakin users (staff and students)	This is done by the blog Administrator in the ‘Reading’ settingsSettings > Reading > Site Visibility > Check the button next to ‘I would like my blog to be visible only to registered users of Deakin University Sites’	The site Administrators need to be comfortable with changing the settings (which is a simple toggle change).Site Administrators may need to update/maintain this setting if the purpose of the blog changes over time.
An already defined group of Deakin users (e.g. staff or students from a specific school, or staff in a particular business area).*You need to be aware that with this option BOTH visibility and writing access are restricted to the SAME group of users.	This can be done with Single-Sign-On (SSO), and is implemented via eSolutions. This can be done as part of the request to create the blog.If you know the IAM group, please provide the group alias.	Once implemented – None.
A specific group of users	For restricting visibility for a sub-set of Deakin users, this is done by the blog Administrator in the ‘Reading’ settings, plus by adding each user who needs to view the blog.Settings > Reading > Site Visibility > Check the button next to ‘I would like my blog to be visible only to registered users I add to <site name>’ Users > Add User > Assign each user to the appropriate roles. You can add multiple users at once via Add Bulk Users (you still need to know each person’s username).	The site Administrators will need to know the Deakin username of each person who needs to see the blog.The site Administrators will need to add each user who needs to see the blog with the appropriate role, and maintain this list of users and roles.

Writing/contributing

Contributions to your blogs can be made in a range of ways (see https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities). These roles range from the ability to contribute only posts or comments that are moderated before being published (Contributor) to the ability to add pages, posts and comments and manage other people’s posts and comments (Editor).

Once a user has access to write on a blog, the site Administrator can change their role as required via the ‘Users’ administration screen.

I want the following people to be able to write on my blog:	How is this done?	What are the administrative overheads?
Anyone – can comment on blog posts*Note this does not allow people to write posts or pages.	This is done by the site Administrator in the Discussion settingsSettings > Discussion > Other comment settings > Uncheck the button next to ‘Users must be registered and logged in to comment’	All comments must be moderated (approved and published) by the site Administrators.
Deakin users (staff and students) – as long as you want all Deakin users to have the same initial role	eSolutions can assign all users within a default role (e.g. Contributor or Author)	The site Administrators will need to be prepared to actively manage blog contributions – noting that any Deakin user will be able to contribute to the blog in some way.Site administrators will need to manage and maintain user roles for anyone who needs a different level of access from the default role.
An already defined group of Deakin users (e.g. staff or students from a specific school, or staff in a particular business area).*You need to be aware that with this option BOTH visibility and writing access are restricted to the SAME group of users	This can be done with Single-Sign-On (SSO), which is implemented via eSolutions. This can be done as part of the request to create the blog.In addition, eSolutions can assign all users within this group to a default role (e.g. Contributor or Author) OR Site Administrators will need to assign and manage roles within the blog, via the ‘Users’ administration screen.	The site Administrators will need to be prepared to actively manage blog contributions – noting that any user within the group will be able to contribute to the blog in some way.The site Administrators may need to assign and maintain user roles.
A specific group of users	For providing writing roles to a sub-set of Deakin users, this is done by the blog Administrator in the ‘User’ administration screen by adding each user who needs to contribute to the blogUsers > Add User > Assign each user to the appropriate roles. You can add multiple users at once via Add Bulk Users (you still need to know each person’s username).	The site Administrators will need to add each user who needs to contribute to the blog with the appropriate role, and maintain this list of users.
External (non-Deakin) users	For enabling some external users to contribute to the blog, a request needs to be submitted to eSolutions (see https://blogs.deakin.edu.au/blog/2014/02/05/can-i-add-non-deakin-people-as-contributors-to-my-blog/). As well as enabling the person to constibute, this will allow the external person to view the blog (if it isn’t already public).	The writing role that external users are assigned is ‘Contributor’ (i.e. their posts and comments must be approved by the site Administrators). Site Administrators can change and manage roles once the external user has access.