This is cool. I’ve added the Add User Widget. If you have a blog, you can open it for anyone in the thripp.com community to post to. Go to Design > Widgets, click “Add” for the “Add Users” widget, fill out the settings, and click “Save Changes.” Then, anyone logged in can add himself as an author right from your blog’s sidebar. He can then post to your blog, but can only edit or delete his own posts, not mess up anything else. He can tag posts, but not pick categories. I’ve used it for my new Adventures in Photography community, and you can add anything of value to it, or make your own thripp.com blog collaborative.
Above is a screen capture of the settings in Design > Widgets I’m using for my photography group. The title will be bold, but you can change the text; same for the “Add me!” button. You can pick author, contributor, or subscriber—these are using the Wordpress Roles and Capabilities levels. Only author is useful, because the other two do not let the user make posts. The settings at the bottom let you allow only users who have the email addresses you list register to post. If you leave the box unchecked as I have, any thripp.com user can sign up, and the error message box is irrelevant.
Of course this opens your blog to spamming, if there are malicious members that pop up. You can edit or delete any postings though. Most people here are good so this is worth it. The only bad thing is there are no permissions for Manage Media, so any registrant can delete the images or files you’ve uploaded to the thripp.com server. If you know a fix for this, let me know. This isn’t a problem if you don’t post images, or you hotlink them from ImageShack or elsewhere.
While I was at it, I added the WP-Sticky and WP-o-Matic plugins. I’m using both of these on Adventures in Photography. You can activate them from your Plugins menu if you want them for your blog. WP-Sticky lets you keep a post at the top of your blog always (useful for links, news, mission statements, etc.), and WP-o-Matic lets you make automated posts from the content of an RSS feed. It’s resource heavy so I wrote a lot of advisors and warnings on the Plugins page (log in, click Site Admin, click Plugins), but try it if you need it. On the photography blog, I’m using it to automatically fetch and repost my photography articles from my personal blog, and amazingly, it won’t interfere with the manual postings of I or other contributors. They’re in a specific category there, so I just added “/feed” to the end of the category URI, looped it through FeedBurner, and gave the FeedBurner feed URI (feeds.feedburner.com/rxt-photo-articles) for the WP-o-Matic “campaign.” It’s working fine. There are special feeds for each category you create here; you can just add “/feed” to the URI to get to them (there are no links elsewhere), if you want to do the same. At least 0.01% of my users will.
The WP-Sticky addition is great, because with the Advanced Category Excluder already available to all thripp.com bloggers, you have something like a content management system rather than a plain blog.Though I’ve done no original coding, I’ve gone through the work of implementing these features from open-source projects. I don’t see anyone else offering this kind of service for free. This is ground-breaking stuff.
Oh, and I made the “posted by” name link to your website while I was at it. You can see an example below this post’s title, where it says “By Richard X. Thripp.” It links to your blog here, or the website in your profile if you’ve specified one. And I moved the hit counter to the footer. And I set up a LiveJournal mirror for this development blog using the LiveJournal cross poster under Settings > LiveJournal.
