WordPress MU (WPMU) is a great tool.
It’s basically a fork from the main WordPress software that lets you set up and maintain potentially vast numbers of blogs from a single codebase. It’s particularly popular with universities and HE institutions, such as Harvard Law School (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu), and a range of UK universities including here at Kent.
Why registration?
So, why would you want to allow user registration for blogs? Mostly, blogging is all about free commenting on posts, and the onus is on the blogger to filter out dodgy comments.
If you’re like me with just a handful of comments every month, fine.
If you’re an institution like a university, this opens up the proverbial can of worms (I’ve never seen a real can of worms, but I’m sure it’s not pretty) to do with complaints, disciplinary procedures, legal stuff. Far better to force people to register before making a comment, so there’s at least a way of telling whether they’re from the institution, or a member of the public.
No comment.
WordPress MU registration system is bad. Not in a cool sense of bad. It’s just terrible.
1. Confusing to users. You might want to register for MyHappyBlog because you want to comment on a blog post. The moment you register you’re sent on a multi-click process which takes you far, far away not just from the familiarity of MyHappyBlog, but from the post, and any memory of the stinging critique you were going to deliver. No comment, quite literally.
1a. …oh and by the way, just to make it even more confusing, the user will be sent an impossible-to-remember password after they’ve registered. Although this is touted as being secure (I’m sure it is), it’s just impractical. Either the user will forget the password, or they’ll forget to change it.
2. Confusing to developers. WordPress MU registration works fine so long as you follow the way it does things. If for some bizarre reason you want to change the way the registration page looks (you mad fool!), you have to change the core code. As any developer will tell you, this is generally a very stupid thing to do, and ipso facto a stupid thing to force people to do.
Logged out
I should just add that it’s actually not just the registration system in WPMU. Standard WordPress has a curious login page which is very hard to change. Yes, you can get round this in part with filters and plugins and whatnot. But the point is that changing the way something looks should never, never, require a developer to hack around a bit. This is what themes are for.
Summary
My advice to anyone considering user registrations in WPMU? Don’t. The fact that the registration system is so quirky might be indicative of the relatively relaxed approach most bloggers have towards commenting. You may want to ask why it is that you absolutely must have user registrations for your institutional blogs.
Wow Matthew, I am just running into these very same problems and you are telling me to forget user registration in WPMU
That is too bad, since I was hoping to use registered users to colaborate on a Events blog using the Calendar plugin… Seems like this is going to be more cumbersome than I imagined.
A visitor that wants to become a Registered User gets diverted to the signup process on the main blog after which he/she is assigned as a User to that main blog and NOT to the initial blog. Although the system now allows this user to ‘log in’ for commenting (although that is not what I want/need), it does NOT allow acces to the Admin panel of that initial blog as the user gets redirected to Admin panel on main blog which means there is no access to the shared Events admin page… Unless I manually make any new user a member of that Events blog, it is not going to work
You are right: “WordPress MU registration system is bad” … Bummer…
By the way (and off-topic so delete if you want to), I notice you use Events Calendar. Does that plugin allow collaboration of events in any way?
Hi RavanH,
Well when I wrote that I was probably a little fed up with having to deal with user registration quirks in WPMU! I still feel that user registration is pretty poor, and in some ways for anyone other than actual bloggers I don’t see much point in it. ie. just moderate your comments – so why would you want people to sign in to comment.
That said, registration is good enough that if you have a limited number of users contributing to an events blog you’d be fine. WPMU only really sucks when lots of people have to deal with the horrible registration process.
I haven’t really looked at Events Calendar as a collaborative thing. All it really seems to do is add a start/end date field to a post, which in turn can be used in a special widget for that plugin. It’s really very simple. I guess it would be collaborative only if different users could edit the post.
Again rather off-topic, but have you ever considered using Drupal? As a somewhat more powerful CMS it may offer what you’re looking for. But it may also be overkill for your needs.
@RavanH
@matthew
Well, since Drupal is not an option (the other contributors feel more comfortable with WP) and since we would like to make the Events collaboration blog as open to anyone as possible (basically unlimited number of contributors) this seems to become a bit of a problem…
I searched around and found some forum threads on this very same topic and even an older effort to build a plugin to ‘fix’ it on http://labs.creativecommons.org/2008/07/01/per-blog-registrations-for-wordpress-mu/ (tested it and does not work in WPMU 2.7.1) and a workaround for particular blogs on http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/9913?replies=18 (not tested yet).
I also understand that BuddyPress extends/alters the login process but have no experience with that one. You?
For now, the best option I see is to make the Event blog registration process a manual one via a request form (to avoid confusing main blog signup process) and subsequent admin invite + user confirmation… Unless… I have no idea where to start but do you see any possibilities to get that old plugin attempt working on current MU? In which case I would be happy to attempt that.
@matthew
Another thought: how would an OpenID login process influence this whole affair? Sadly, the only active OpenID plugin (so it seems) on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/ is not compatible with MU out of the box. The only MU specific plugin by Automaticc on seems terrible abandoned
Then there is Cimy Extra Fields plugin on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cimy-user-extra-fields/ that is compatible with MU (great!) but it only extends the signup process as far as I can see.
All so sad…
Totally agree about the WordPress MU user registration. It’s a freakin’ nightmare!!! I’ve spend 3 entire days setting up a server with WordPress MU, BuddyPress, bbPress, Themes, Plugins, Translations, multi-domains (users can choose to be a sub-domain of a selection of 8), real domains (domains being actually sub-blogs on the WordPress MU, but only showing another root domain, not sub-domain of WordPress MU)
Anyhow… After some hair-tearing, crying, and kicking some furniture I have everything in order now… but… the freakin’ registration!!!
Now users can sign up, cannot select a password, and then receive an e-mail telling them to logon using the password they selected (not!).
The only way to register now is to immidiately use the “forgot password” function the first time you want to log on, which is just plain stupid.