WPMu plugin patrol

While doing a quick sweep for WordPress Multi-User plugins on WPMuDev.org I came across two plugins that make me all the more certain that WordPress is without question the premiere open-source online publishing platform freely available to everyone.

“More Privacy Options” Plugin
The first, and maybe the most impressive plugin yet (at least for me), is what seems like a relatively simple affair that adds three more privacy options to control the blog visibility for sites within the Multi-User environment. As those of us in education understand all too well, the limited ability for controlling access and permissions (as much as we often hate it) was far too meager with only two privacy options: let Google and company crawl your site or don’t let them crawl your site. Such an “array” of options when talking about privacy in regards to WPMu was not very convincing for many folks. That has all changed now!

Blog visibility

With the “More Privacy Options” plugin individual blog proprietors can choose from the above two listed already as well as the following: choose whether or not to let anyone from outside the WPMu community see their site; prevent anyone from viewing their site who is not a registered user on their site; or even limiting access to only themselves and administrators. Yes, yes, yes!!! Finally some headway on permissions. This, ladies and gentlemen, is huge for a community of educational bloggers like those congregated at UMW Blogs. We can now host every blog in the UMW community within the UMW Blogs environment. A major step forward in terms of upgrade management, database consolidation, and all around WordPress goodness.

Sidebar Add Users

Another amazingly useful and time saving plugin for anyone using WPMu with class blogs that have numerous authors is the Sidebar Add users plugin/widget. This plugin puts a sign-up form in the sidebar that allows users already registered within the WPMu community to register themselves as users for a blog that has this widget activated. This will save us here at UMW a ton of time as we are using blogs throughout this system in numerous ways, one of which is to have a class of students authoring on one blog. So rather than inputting them as authors one by one in the administrative backend, they can sign-up for themselves, and as long as they are already users within the wider WPMU community.

Sidebar Register

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7 Responses to WPMu plugin patrol

  1. Martha says:

    Two very cool plugins. Particularly the security one. I hate to see any blog locked-down (blogs want to be free!!), but, I guess, occasionally, once-in-a-great-while, there is a good reason, and it’s always been frustrating that there is now way to do it easily.

    BTW, I love that cat.

  2. jimgroom says:

    I totally agree, Martha. This is huge for us. We can finally challenge all those Drupal suckers to a showdown!!!

  3. Martha says:

    *and it’s always been frustrating that there was no way to do it easily.

    Wow. I didn’t think I was *that* tired when I wrote that comment. Ugh. 🙂

  4. Laura says:

    I added the privacy one last week. Our help desk students are using the blog to post information and share tips, but they wanted it to be private. It’s working wonderfully!

  5. Jeff says:

    As always, my first reaction is way to go! [And my second is, now how can I get Jim to install this for me…?]

  6. jimgroom says:

    Jeff,
    It is installed, just go to Options –> Privacy and behold the magic of all things WPMu!

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