Planet WordPress

I moved the bulk of Red Alt to the Asymptomatic server last night because I got tired of that unmanaged server going down. The Asymptomatic server is managed, and so should get better attention when things go awry.

This also allows me to house a more permanent subversion repository (if that means anything to you) for all of the PHP development I do around here.

On top of that, it paves the way for a few minor changes at Red Alt, mostly revolving around the navigation and a wiki upgrade. Many of the navigation links there don’t work because I’m usually off doing something else rather than hooking them up. I’m going to go through all of those and make them all work.

Anyway, in case you were thinking about ignoring this news, I have updated one of my plugins for WordPress 2.0: Limit Categories

Limit Categories allows you to set limits on the categories to which users in certain Roles can post. If you create a new Role called “Guest Posters”, you can add new users to that Role, and the users with that Role will only be able to post to the “Guest Posts” category.

This makes it easy to section out your site to different writers by category, bringing your WordPress installation more toward a CMS.

Limit Categories does not limit the categories that logged-in users can view - that’s a different plugin. It might also not work as well with WordPress admin consoles that have been “redesigned”, but you can try it.

You can read more about and download Limit Categories at Red Alt, where you will also find the Role Manager plugin, which will be very useful for creating new Roles.

I’ve noticed a strange upshoot in new and updated plugins released around the WordPress 2.0 milestone. That’s probably a good thing.

Something that was conspicuously left out of the WordPress core (yes, it was on purpose) was a way to manage Roles as an administrator. Well, add this Role Manager plugin to the list of new WordPress 2.0 plugins.

Note that this plugin does not really do anything but manage roles. If your blog has no need to maintain Roles (for example, if you’re the only author) then you don’t need this plugin. But if you have plugins that depend on capability levels, or you want to manage groups of user permissions, then this will allow you to do that.

More details about how the plugin works and what you can do with it are available on the documentation site. This includes not just the admin user interface, but also instructions for how your plugin can cleanly add new capabilities to WordPress that the Role Manager will display in its interface.

Many thanks to David House who helped with a substantial bit of coding on this one.

Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu Plugin for WordPress is something that I’ve been waiting for someone else to write for a long time. If you’re not using this, then you’re certainly not a power user.

I don’t often write about other people’s plugins, but this one is so simple and essential in must be made more public.

Thanks so much for this!