I run a series of sites about the Finer Things in Tech. They contain short tips about handy features, clever UI polish, and other perks. I use WordPress MU (note: not WordPress.org) to power the sites, and I accept user-submitted posts via the TDO Mini Forms plugin. This way, anyone can visit a page at the site with a form, like this one, to submit a post. It’s convenient, and users don’t have to register with my WordPress install just to share something awesome. Unfortunately, TDO Mini Forms has some quirks, and since I switched from regular self-hosted WordPress to WordPress MU, it has even more.
I am now considering just allowing readers to register with my WordPress MU install as “Contributors” so they can draft their own posts in the WordPress UI. This way I figure they can add legitimate profiles, use much better blogging tools, and the WooTheme I use should “just work” in terms of displaying the proper author attribution.
But I have a few questions about going this route: As I understand it, “Contributor” is very low on the WordPress user permissions scale, but I could still allow them to upload media for their posts. Is there any danger to allowing people to register as Contributors? I use extremely complicated and secure passwords for my admin and author accounts (generated by 1Password, natch), so I’m not too worried about those.
I’m more wondering about things like how many users WordPress (and WordPress MU) can competently handle, and other management and performance issues. I don’t expect hundreds of signups, but you never know.
Welcome, I'm David Chartier. I currently work for Agile Web Solutions (the 1Password folks) and Macworld. You may also have seen my writing at Ars Technica, Wired, TUAW, Download Squad, and elsewhere. I run a series of sites about the Finer Things in Mac, iPhone, and Web, highlighting tips, features, productivity, and other goodies in tech products.
The contributor access shoudl be just fine.
As for how many users, there’s dozens if not hundreds of WP & MU sites out there with literally thousands of users, yes even on one blog. If you get to the point you need to scale up the hardware, MU can certainly handle it.
Permissions-wise: try it out with a test contributor account, see what you can and can’t do. Media uploads might be an issue, but there’s a maximum file size and per-site quota (and if you’re a WPMU site admin, they won’t apply to you).
Number of users shouldn’t be a problem at all, unless your database is unusually flaky. On the list of things to worry about, that particular concern is somewhere near the bottom (especially as many WP sites allow just about everyone to register in order to post comments).
Thanks for the advice guys. I think I’m going to end up switching to the registration model, but I’m going to wait for WP 3.0 to see if it fixes the registration problem with WPMU sites. Right now, if I let people register at a site (like mac.finerthingsin.com), they register with the main finerthingsin.com site, not the specific site they intended to sign up for. It’s a big oversight into the user registration process.
If it isn’t fixed in WP 3.0, I’ve found a solid, commercial alternative to TDO Mini Forms, Gravity Forms: http://www.gravityforms.com. If I can’t easily solve this problem, it seems like Gravity has a decent business going so they should be around for a bit. We’ll see.