How do I add a collaborator guest account to my site?

Pressable makes it easy for you to collaborate with other people on your website. This makes it easy for you to share credentials with designers, developers and other collaborators, while keeping your account and other sites in it safe and secure. Collaborator access will grant them site-specific access to MyPressable, the site’s wp-admin, SFTP, and phpMyAdmin.

We also have account-level access for Collaborators, outlined here.

Add a Collaborator

To add a collaborator to an individual website under your account login to MyPressable, click the name of the site you wish to add the collaborator to and navigate to the Connections menu on the left navigation bar. Under that, you can go to the Collaborators section. Click on the Add Collaborators button to view the option.

Step 1: Enter the collaborator’s email address.

Step 2: Select appropriate permissions for the User and then click on Add. Please note that, regardless of these permissions, your collaborator will see the site within their MyPressable control panel.

Once added, you will be able to see the list of Users on a site similar to this:

Your collaborator will receive an email that looks something like this:

Collaborator Access and Permissions

Collaborators only have access to the website they have been added to, and can only view/edit aspects of the site for which they have permissions.

By default, the permissions are set to enable the following functions:

Updating User Permissions

If you need to update permissions for a user after adding them, this can be done from the Collaborators section under the Connections menu as well. Under the Actions drop-down next to the user you want to update permissions for, you can find the Permissions option. Once you click on that, a pop-up window opens with the list of permissions. Once you check/un-check the permissions that you want to update, you can click on the Update Permissions button.

You will see the list of permissions, check or un-check actions the User is permitted to perform and then click on the Update Permissions button:

Removing a Collaborator

You can remove collaborators at any time by visiting MyPressable, selecting the site you’d like to remove the collaborator from, clicking the Connections menu and then the Collaborators section. Under the Actions drop-down, you can find the Delete option.

That will open a popup that will ask if you’d like to delete the collaborator’s WP Admin user from the site as well as remove them from your account and also ask you to confirm the collaborator’s email address before deleting:

If the user no longer requires Administrator access in your WP Admin but you’d still like to keep their content assigned to their user, you can change their role to a Subscriber role in the WP Admin of the site:

See the Collaborators in Bulk section for information on updating or removing collaborators from multiple sites.

Collaborators in Bulk

Collaborators can be added to and removed from multiple sites at once from the “Collaborators” page here: my.pressable.com/collaborators

Please see the information in the Account-Level Collaborators section for more details.

Collaborating on a Website

If you’ve been asked to collaborate on a Pressable website, you’ll receive an email asking you to create a password.

Once you’ve done so, you’ll have access to your own MyPressable control panel, with your own permissions, depending on what the account owner set for you.

Account-Level Collaborators

If you would like for a specific collaborator to be added to all future sites created in your account by default (and all existing sites if desired), this can be done from the Collaborators page here: https://my.pressable.com/collaborators

• Step 1: Enter the collaborator’s email address.
  
• Step 2: Select appropriate capabilities for the User and then click on Add. Please note that, regardless of these capabilities, your collaborator will see the site within their MyPressable control panel.
  
• Step 3: Select the list of sites to which you want the collaborator to be added, or you can choose to add them to all sites.
  
• Step 4: Select appropriate site-level permissions for the User and then click on Add. Choose the permissions the collaborator should be given (remember that these will be their permissions for all future sites).
  
• Once this Account-Level Collaborator has been added, they will show up in the Manage Collaborators section on this page: https://my.pressable.com/collaborators
  

Updating Account-Level Collaborator’s Capabilities and Site Permissions

If you need to update an Account-Level Collaborator’s site permissions and capabilities, you can follow these steps –

• Click on the user’s email address from the Manage Collaborators page or visit the link https://my.pressable.com/collaborators/<email>
• Under the Collaborator Actions menu, click on Update Capabilities, and this will open a section where you can toggle the Capabilities and check/uncheck Permissions.
  Once done, click on the Update New Site Capabilities button at the bottom to save the changes.

Deleting Account-Level Collaborators

When removing Account-Level Collaborators, you will see a pop-up screen like this:

That will open a pop-up that will ask if you’d like to delete the collaborator’s WP Admin user from all of your sites as well as remove them from your account, and also ask you to confirm the collaborator’s email address before deleting.

Collaborator Hasn’t Received Email

If you set up an Account-Level Collaborator but they haven’t received their invitation email yet, the most likely cause is that you don’t have any sites set up under the account. Please first make sure a site is created under the account, then re-set up the Account-Level Collaborator.

Understanding Account-Level Collaborator Capabilities

When adding account-level collaborators, you can now assign six different capabilities:

1. Add collaborator to new sites – Automatically adds the collaborator to any new sites you create, using pre-defined permissions.
2. Create sites for you – Allows the collaborator to create sites on your behalf.
3. Receive notifications related to your account – The collaborator will receive account-related emails, such as site transfer issues or Titan email order failures.
4. Receive notifications related to your site management – The collaborator will receive emails about PHP and WordPress updates on your sites.
5. Receive notifications related to your site operations – The collaborator will receive emails for operational events like new site deployments, clones, restores, and data syncs.
6. Provide notifications on your behalf – Allows the collaborator to grant capabilities #3, #4, and #5 to other collaborators.

Email Notifications to Collaborators

By default, most of our emails are sent to either site owners or the person who triggered a specific event, like site transfer requests, site syncs, and restores. With this new capability, you can now have certain emails sent directly to your collaborators, giving them greater visibility into these events.

As mentioned in a previous section, we now have 3 types of email notifications assignable via capabilities:

• Account Notifications
• Site Management Notifications
• Site Operation Notifications

Account Notifications

These are the 4 existing emails that have been updated for this feature.

• Failure moving the Titan email order from trial to paid
• Site transfer issue due to the live site space limit being reached
• Site transfer issue due to the staging site space limit being reached
• Site transfer pending

Please note that these emails don’t require the recipient to be a collaborator on a specific site; having the account notification capability alone is sufficient to receive them.

Site Management Notifications

Users with this capability enabled will receive notifications whenever PHP or WordPress updates are applied to any site under your account.

Site Operation Notifications

For collaborators to receive these notifications, they need two things: site operation notification access from another account and collaborator access to the site where the event takes place.

These six existing emails have been updated to support this feature:

• New site has been deployed
• Site has been cloned
• Site restore failed
• Site restore succeeded
• Site sync failed
• Site sync succeeded

Understanding Collaborator Site Permissions

There are several permissions you can assign to your collaborators. If you’re unsure what any of them do, refer to the list below for details.

Actions

• PHPMyAdmin Access – Allows your collaborator access to your sites through the popular open source phpMyAdmin software and programmatically. This provides them with MySQL access to your sites.
• Clone Site – Allows your collaborator to create an exact copy of your site – generally this is used for debugging without affecting the live site or for development work. This will be created in your account, not theirs, and may impact your billing (e.g. a very large site is cloned which causes you to go over your storage allowance).
• Enable Site – Sites in your account can be enabled and disabled to allow or disallow public access. This will allow your collaborator to enable your site if it is currently disabled.
• Disable Site – Allows your collaborator to disable your site if it is currently enabled, preventing public access to it.
• Delete Site – Allows your collaborator to delete your site. Deletion of a site will schedule it and all backups for deletion. We apply a grace period to all deleted sites to account for accidental deletion/data recovery, but beyond this period we will be unable to recover your site or any backups. Proceed with caution when giving this permission to collaborators.

Overview

• WP Access – This permission will create an administrator user on your site for this collaborator to allow access to the WP Admin Dashboard.
• Update Site Custom Name – Allows your collaborator to change the custom name given to your site in the My Pressable Control Panel.
• Update Site WordPress Version – Allows your collaborator to change the version of WordPress your site is running, such as updating to a new beta version for testing.
• Update Site PHP Version – Allows your collaborator to change the PHP version in use by your site. Over time, PHP versions become outdated and need to be changed. Some plugins/themes may also require (or not be compatible with) certain versions.
• Convert Site – Allows your collaborator to change a staging site to a live site and vice versa.
• Manage Notes – Allows your collaborator to add, edit and delete notes for this site in the My Pressable Control Panel.
• Execute Bulk Operations – Allows your collaborator to execute bash commands or run bulk operations on sites they have access to. By default, this is disabled for all existing collaborators.
• Manage WordPress – Allows your collaborator to manage plugins/themes from the dashboard. They can view/update/activate/deactivate plugins/themes on the site with with feature. Also allows your collaborator to enable/disable Basic Authentication.

Domains

• Manage DNS – Allows your collaborator to add and remove domain(s) from your site, as well as edit the DNS entries for those domains (such as MX Records for your e-mail service).

Performance

• Manage Performance – Allows your collaborator access to the “Performance” tab for your site in the My Pressable Control Panel. Actions such as enabling and disabling the CDN, flushing the Object Cache and viewing site analytics can be done in this tab.

Users

• SFTP Access – Provides SFTP credentials and access to your collaborator. This is useful for access to the site’s files to manually upload/change/delete them.
• Create Collaborator – Allows your collaborator to add other collaborators to this site. This will allow them to provide any permissions to the new collaborator, including those they do not have themselves. Proceed with caution when giving this permission to collaborators.
• Delete Collaborator – Allows your collaborator to delete other collaborators from this site.
• Reset Collaborator Password – By default, your collaborator can always reset their own SFTP password. This permission will allow your collaborator to also reset the SFTP passwords of any other collaborators on the site.

Backups and Restores

• Download Backups – Allows your collaborator to download previous file system and database backups for this site.
• Restore Site – Allows your collaborator to use the Site Restore functionality. Using this, they can restore your site to one of the previous backups we hold for the site.

Git

• Manage Git – Allows your collaborator access to the “Git” tab for your site in the My Pressable Control Panel. This will allow them to setup and manage the connection between your site and a GitHub repository.

Plugin Management

• Plugin Management Access – Allows your collaborator access to Plugin Management functionality (add-on functionality that needs to be purchased per-site). This will allow them to setup and manage update schedules for plugins on your site(s).

Manage Collaborators via Pressable API

Collaborators can be added and managed via the API directly:
https://my.pressable.com/documentation/api/v1#collaborators