Comments on: More on Upgrading to WPMu 1.3

By: Reverend

Reverend — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 10:43:42 +0000

Hey dsader,

Here is my testing of the new Userthemes plugin for 1.5.1 and 2.6 beta 1 (sweet new look by the way, great work!).

WPMU 1.5.1
When you go to userthemes it has the following error message for certain plugins it seems to be colliding with (in this case wpmu signup captcha):

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter – headers already sent (output started at
/home/…/wp-content/mu-plugins/1676498319_userthemes_26.php:853) in /home/…/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpmu-signup-captcha.php on line 30

After deleting these plugins, the error message went away, but after I copied a theme to the themes folder for a particaulr blog and clicked on the edit button I got the following error.

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/…/wp-content/mu-plugins/1676498319_userthemes_26.php:853) in /home/…/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 701

This error, however, does not prevent me from editing the themes

WPMU 2.6

When you go to userthemes it has the following error message for certain plugins it seems to be colliding with (in this case post ratings and wpmu signup captcha):

When you click on edit theme:

By: dsader

dsader — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:53:21 +0000

It’s up at wpmudev.org.

By: Reverend

Reverend — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:45:22 +0000

Hey D. Sader,

I am a huge fan of your plugin, and would love to kick the tires. I am using the stock plugin out of the wpmudev box. The only thinking a did for WPMU 1.5.1 to make it look better in the edit themes tab, was to copy over the newest edit-themes.php file from the latest single wp install. Is the update on wpmudev.org yet? –or would it be better for me to contact you?

Best,
Jim

By: dsader

dsader — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:02:53 +0000

jimgroom,
I’ve been fiddling with an update to the userthemes1.1 plugin hosted at wpmudev.org, wondering if you could share the version of the plugin you have installed, if it differs from http://wpmudev.org/project/Userthemes-1.1.

I have a “beta” version ready and running for WPMU2.5->2.6. Are you interested and do you have time and a WPMU 2.5.1+ test/sandbox blog available so you could “kick the tires”?

It has fewer bugs, but is by no means bug free.

Thanks,

D. Sader

By: jimgroom

jimgroom — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:53:34 +0000

Well said, Martha.

I think the logic for WPMu for most folks is one administrator and hundreds and/or thousands of blogs that really couldn’t afford to experiment as we are at UMW. Which, as you say so well, makes the case for making the work we are doing more visible. I know Donncha has come across this blog before, and he himself is a regular blogger, so I wouldn;t be surprised if he saw the argument. And the fix may be as simple as taking the theme-editor.php file from the latest WP releases. But I, like you, would like to get a sense of why the need to avoid all risk.

In the end, and administrator has to upload this plugin, activate it, hack a core file, then allow individual users to edit their themes. All these steps would suggest that the administrator has considered the risks, or at least is to blame for any problems that ensue. I don;t think it would reflect poorly on the WPMu application.

By: Martha

Martha — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:47:23 +0000

Jim,

First, thanks again for taking care of this from afar. Not having userthemes would have been pretty crippling, and I’m glad to hear the fix wasn’t too hard to track down.

I agree with you wholeheartedly about leaving it up to WPMU administrators to determine the best way to make features like userthemes available to users.

It seems a bit heavyhanded for the developers to simply decide that they know best on this front.

In our case, as you’ve pointed out, userthemes is primarily used by those of us who are already well-versed in the ins and outs of editing themes in vanilla WP. What it allows is for you to effectively distribute the administrative capabilities among expert users (and, it would seem to me that “growing” expert users is a good thing).

The fact of the matter is that WPMU doesn’t seem to provide much in the way of administrative tools/approaches for this kind of distribution, meaning that without userthemes in order to distribute administration you have to take the (I would argue) greater security risk of opening up server access to multiple users.

Userthemes, if used effectively and intelligently, seems to address this missing feature.

I wonder if part of this stems from a lack of awareness by the greater WPMU community about how this application is being used by institutions like our own. What do you think their basic “case use” is? What kind of site are they ideally building this application for? Wordpress.com?

Perhaps it also points to why we (in education) need to do a better job of making visible the ways in which WPMU is being used by colleges and universities, pushing the issues (like distributed administration) to the forefront of the developers’ conversation.