Safely offboard a former developer

UsersAdvanced~15 min

Before you start

A connected site whose bound user holds the promote-users and delete-users capabilities, with the get-user, update-user, delete-user, and activity-log abilities enabled. delete-user is off by default.

Offboarding someone with real access is two jobs people tend to blur into one: revoke what they can do now, and clean up what they own later. Doing it in a hurry either leaves a live login open or orphans a pile of content. This walks the two jobs in order and keeps each one behind your confirmation.

The prompt
[Jordan] has left the project and I need to offboard their account cleanly.
Walk it in stages and confirm with me before each change.
Start read only: pull [Jordan]'s account, their role and how much content
they own, and check the activity log for anything they did through the agent
recently. Show me that first.
Then cut their access: lower their role to [Subscriber] so they can't change
anything, which I can undo if I got the wrong person. Once I've confirmed the
site is fine without them, delete the account and reassign all of their
content to [me / a named editor] so nothing they wrote gets orphaned. You
can't delete the last administrator, and the reassignment means their posts
survive the removal. Finish with a summary of the role change, the deletion,
and where the content landed.

Why this is safe to run

The opening is all reads: the account details plus the plugin’s own audit log, which shows what that person did through the agent and attributes each call to them. Then the destructive part is split into two gated steps. Lowering the role uses the promote-gated update ability and is reversible, so access is cut first with no risk. Deleting the account is a separate ability, off until you enable it, and it reassigns all of the person’s content to a user you name rather than deleting the work. The plugin will not remove the last administrator, and every step, from the role change to the deletion, lands in the Activity Log so the offboarding leaves a trail.

Already connected? Ask your agent for the “offboard a former developer” recipe and it runs the same staged, confirm-each flow on your own team.

How it works

  1. Read the departing account: its role and how much content it owns.
  2. Check the plugin's activity log for what they did through the agent recently.
  3. Lower their role first so they can no longer change anything, a reversible step.
  4. Wait for you to confirm the site is fine without them.
  5. Delete the account and reassign all of its content to a user you name.
  6. Summarize the role change, the deletion, and where the content landed.

Questions

Why lower the role before deleting instead of just deleting?
Cutting the role revokes access immediately and is fully reversible, so if it turns out you named the wrong person you just restore them. Deletion is permanent, so the flow waits until you have confirmed nothing breaks before taking that step.
Will their posts and pages disappear with them?
No. delete-user reassigns everything the account owns to a user you name, so their work survives the offboarding under new ownership. The plugin also refuses to delete the last administrator, so the flow can never strand the site.