Allowing users to Sign-up > Login > Post articles that need approval

Question

I need your advice!

I have a small hobby website, it's a small music magazine, with all the content published by me. It's setup with an open source Wordpress Theme with my custom graphics and CSS. I want to turn it into something else now, and allow users to have the ability to be able to sign-up > login > and post articles and any pretty much any post content they'd like. But I'd like it to be sent to my email or something for me to have to 'approve it' before it's published?

Whats a good approach of taking a standard Wordpress small magazine site, and creating allowing these functionalities? Is this a page or two of gluing PHP snippets together from around the web, could this be handled with a good plugin or two - or is it something deeper?

Thanks as always!

Answer 1

What you're asking for is part of core WordPress functionality. Simply assign the appropriate user role to new users. For example, the Contributor user role can draft - but not publish - new posts. Such posts then require someone with publish privileges to approve/publish them.

To set the default role for new users, go to Dashboard -> Settings -> General and set the New User Default Role setting.

Answer 2

Have you tried Buddypress? it might be overkill though...

A better solution might be to allow users to sign up to your site (adjust this in your options page) and then using a plugin to make a Custom User Role that can create posts and pages, edit them and so on, but not publish them (rember to set the new user role as custom for new sign ups). Search for "Custom User Role wordpress".