Sorry if I am missing something or if I come across negative, I don’t mean to be.
I have just started to drag a couple of my sites through Beta and finding wpmudev’s plugins a great help in this.
However, it seems that (IMHO) there is too much focus on users (not hosted site owners) having to use the admin menu.
Couple of examples:
Wordpress Friends Plugin: “Search for and add friends by navigating to: Admin > Friends > Find Friends”
Why can’t this be a widget and perhaps even an addon to allow people to “friend” others directly from posts?
WordPress InvitePlugin: “Invite ability is available under any Site Admin > Users > Invites.”
I know that many users that also have hosted websites would use this to invite people to their own blog but if this was a widget, normal users could use it to invite their friends to the site they are using.
There are many examples like this… They are very useful and well written but I may just not be seeing this right. Here’s a textual description (for want of a better phrase) of the flow diagram of how users generally progress on the sites I have owned, maintained or used over the past 20 years (including some land-line based BBSes).
Visitor joins main hub site (www.somesite.com), has a look around and signs up.
The visitor posts some messages, asks questions and generally acts like a user.
*Here is where we get a fork in the road*
Left > User stays as a user and continues to post and read, maybe look at hosted sites (otherblog.somesite.com).
Right> After a while, this user decides they might like to make a site, they apply or whatever is needed and they start their own site and become a mini-admin *j/k*.
Right > After a length of time of being active, intelligent and communicative, the “mini-admin” gets asked to become a global moderator or some other kind of admin.
This is all good, but what about the user that just wants to use other peoples’ sites? The more I have looked at some of the plugins on a live site with both admin and user accounts, I’m starting to see that some very useful user options are being hidden away in the admin menu.
I’m honestly not “knocking” the work that has been put into these addons and I might just not be seeing things right but I’m at a loss to why this is.
One last thing, although I am not ashamed of WordPress, I have used the Branding addon to hide WordPress mentioning but no matter what I do, in the “normal user” dashboard there’s the latest WordPress Blog showing things like “WordPress 3.4.2 Maintenance and Security Release […]”
Any way of turning those off?
Anyway, thanks for reading my musings but I would appreciate reading any others’ opinions.
Regards,
Bob.