In the following scenario, is there a way to allow each owner to create their own user account and have the account associated only with the owner’s business, so the owner can only edit the information for their own business?

I am using the MyListing theme for a business directory and WP All Import to import records into the directory. In a paid directory, the business owner would pay for their listing and then enter the information for their business listing. However, this is not a paid directory, it is a free service our organization is providing for businesses in our town. We have a spreadsheet with basic information for more than 400 businesses. We don’t want to rely on the business owners to populate the directory, so we will be batch importing the information for each business. The catch is that we want to give the business owners the ability to edit the information for their own business. The only way I can think of to do is to import the owner information and make the owners users, but I cannot think of a way to do that without me assigning the owner a user name and password. And that is the reason for the question I started with.

In the following scenario, is there a way to allow each owner to create their own user account and have the account associated only with the owner’s business, so the owner can only edit the information for their own business?

I am using the MyListing theme for a business directory and WP All Import to import records into the directory. In a paid directory, the business owner would pay for their listing and then enter the information for their business listing. However, this is not a paid directory, it is a free service our organization is providing for businesses in our town. We have a spreadsheet with basic information for more than 400 businesses. We don’t want to rely on the business owners to populate the directory, so we will be batch importing the information for each business. The catch is that we want to give the business owners the ability to edit the information for their own business. The only way I can think of to do is to import the owner information and make the owners users, but I cannot think of a way to do that without me assigning the owner a user name and password. And that is the reason for the question I started with.

• directory

1 Answer 1

Anyone who's editing data would indeed need a WP login, with username and password. Otherwise you're risking just anyone coming along and editing the information.

One approach would be to create a custom role that can edit only their own listing - by this I mean, they can only edit the particular "listing" CPT that they are the author of, and no others. Then make sure that you create enough WP users to handle everything - you can use the gmail trick for this, which is, use your 1 gmail address and add a + symbol plus text. So if you have [email protected], you can also use [email protected] and that will be a unique email for WP that also sends all its messages to your [email protected] account. When you import the data, make sure to assign separate authors to each business. And then once you have real business owners to edit the data, just update their accounts to their own emails and let them choose their passwords. Because you've set up a custom role, they'll only be able to edit their own business and not anything else.