Learning the World

I’ve run into a workflow snag with WordPress MU (well, technically the issue is in WordPress; MU just inherits it): authors can’t add or edit pages.

The problem is basically this:

• I have an academic division web site with an administrator or two.
• I have a handful of editors representing the department heads within that division.
• I have authors who need to be able to add and edit (but not publish) pages.

It’s the last part that WordPress doesn’t support. Ideally, I’d love for the “author” role to function like the “contributor” role does for posts, e.g.: a contributor can write and edit their own posts, but they can’t publish anything.  I’d like the author to do the same thing for pages, allowing a second-tier workflow within the site.

Unfortunately WordPress MU doesn’t work this way out of the box, and based on the comments I’ve read online, it seems that WordPress core isn’t interested in changing this functionality because it differs from WordPress traditional blog mindset. Which I understand, but don’t agree with — I think WordPress has grown into a respectable, lightweight content management system, and adding this additional granularity of editorial control would complete that transition.

So the question is: How to do we manage this? One option is to split up a larger site into sub sites; e.g. instead a single division site, you end up with sub sites for each department.

The other option is to go with a third party module. There are two that look good, particularly when used in conjunction with one another:

• Role Scoper: “Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.”
• Capability Manager: “…provides a simple way to manage role capabilities. Using it, you will be able to change the capabilities of any role, add new roles, copy existing roles into new ones, and add new capabilities to existing roles.”

They look promising, but I haven’t tested either with WordPress MU yet. I’m curious to know how other folks are addressing this problem; if you have any suggestions or experiences to share, please leave a comment!

WordPress MU 2.8.4a refuses to upload .ppsx (PowerPoint Show files for PowerPoint 2007/2008) because the extension hasn’t been defined in the functions “wp_check_filetype” and “wp_ext2type” in /wp-content/functions.php

Not having ppsx defined here causes WordPress? MU to throw the warning “File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.” when uploading the file (even when the ppsx file type itself is blessed in WPMU’s admin options).

I’ve reported the bug to WordPress MU Track here:

• #1118: PPSX not defined as valid file in functions.php

Update

The fix isn’t quite so straightforward as just adding .ppsx to the list of valid PowerPoint extensions, because technically PowerPoint Shows for 2007 have their own MIME type:

• application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow

As does PowerPoint 2007:

• application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation

Specifying the wrong MIME type for PowerPoint Show files caused WordPress to add a .ppt extension to the file, which played havoc with subsequent downloads. The fix was to specify the MIME type in wp_check_filetype:

• ‘ppsx’ => ‘application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow’

My bug report at WordPress MU was closed because this is technically something that needs to be changed in core WordPress; I’ll be reporting it there shortly.