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Transcription
In today’s video, I’ll be showing you a plugin that allows you to impersonate other users, which I find especially helpful when it comes around to helping a user that’s encountering a certain issue, maybe they can’t see something, or something’s not – doesn’t look right to them.
So in the WordPress dashboard, in the Plugins section, let’s click Add New Plugin, and here we’re gonna search for “user switching” and press enter. The first option is going to be by John Blackbourn & contributors, at least that’s the case right now. You’ll know it’s the right one if it has these contributors and the title is User Switching, so I’m going to click install now – and I’m going to click Activate.
Once it’s activated, what you can do is simply go to the users list, and then in the users list, if you hover on any user (apart from yourself because that doesn’t make sense), you will be able to see a new option, it’ll say “Switch to” – see this right here? So if I switch to this user, I’m going to be seeing the world from the perspective of John Doe, and John Doe is a Subscriber, not an Administrator. Not only will I see the world from his perspective, I will be able to act as him, so let’s click.
Okay? So I am now John Doe. You know that because in the top right corner, it says Howdy, John Doe, also, you can tell that I have a lot less options, because I’m a Subscriber now and not an Administrator. Now, again, when I am viewing the world like this, I’m actually able to behave as him, so for example, so if I go to the Hello World post, I can go to the bottom here and leave a comment – and that actually will be posted on his behalf. So we have to be real careful with a plugin like this because we don’t want to do things that will negatively affect the user. I personally rather use it just to see what they’re seeing, to see if there’s maybe a permission issue, maybe there’s something they’re not seeing that they’re supposed to be seeing. That’s my preferred use case.
Now whenever you’re done working with a user, all you have to do to go back to the real world, that is, your actual identity – is to hover in the top-right corner, and then click “Switch back to (your username)”, here.
Now bear in mind – if you have multiple tabs open in your browser, some of those other tabs might still seem like they’re logged in as the old user, but that’s just because they need to be refreshed, that’s it.
And so that’s how it works. Another thing I’ll show you is if you go into the dashboard here, and click Users, okay? You’ll notice that I can actually click through to the user to see the actual full page, and the same option is here – User Switching – Switch to. That’s another way to do it.
And so that’s it. If you guys have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to let me know.