Editing User Details

After users register and settle into their accounts on your site, you, as the site Administrator, have the ability to edit their accounts. You may never have to edit user accounts at all; however, you have the option if you need it. Most often, users can access the details of their own accounts and change e-mail addresses, names, passwords, and so on; however, circumstances under which a site administrator may need to edit user accounts would be to do things such as

• Edit user roles. When a user registers, you may want to increase her role, or level of access, to your site; promote an existing user to Administrator; or conversely, demote an existing Administrator or Editor down a notch or two.
• Edit user e-mails. If a user loses access to the e-mail account that she registered with, she may ask you to change his account e-mail address so that she can access her account notifications again.
• Edit user passwords. If a user loses access to the e-mail account with which she registered, she can't use WordPress's Lost Password feature, which allows users to gain access to their account password through e-mail recovery. In that case, a user may ask you to reset her password for her so that she can log in and access her account again.

In any of these circumstances, you can make the necessary changes by clicking the Users link in the Users menu on your WordPress Dashboard, which loads the Users page shown in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3 shows you the Users page on a site that has multiple users who have different levels of access, or roles (we blurred out the usernames and e-mail addresses in Figure 4-3 to protect the users' privacy).

When you hover over the name of the user, an Edit link appears below the user listing. Click that Edit link to access the Edit User page, where you can edit different pieces of information for that user, including

• Personal Options: These options include Visual Editor and Color Scheme preferences.
• Name: Specify a user's role, first and last name, and nickname.
• Contact Info: Includes users' e-mail addresses; Web sites; and AIM, Yahoo IM, and Google Talk IDs.
• Biographical Info: A few lines of biographical info for the user (optional, but some WordPress themes display authors' biographies).
• New Password: Change the password for the user.

Figure 4-3: The Users page lets you manage all the users on your site.

The Edit User page looks the same, and has the very same features, as the Profile page that you deal with in Book III, Chapter 3 — feel free to visit that chapter to get the lowdown on the different options and settings on this page.