Buddypress Core needs a new position between “Site-wide Admin” and “regular users”. This idea was partially addressed here with regards to forums, but not for entire BP installs.

Let’s say we have a site with 20,000 active users. To moderate that many users we would need at least 100 or so moderators minimum to look after the site. Unfortunately, the only option we have to promote a trustworthy user to is a “Site-wide Admin”. Otherwise they can’t edit/moderate activity comments, blog posts, or blog comments.

It’s obviously a bad idea to give 100+ users the ability to delete your entire site or change options that you don’t want changed in the back-end. The potential for an accident is too great.

But currently there’s no solution to our predicament. Either we only have a few “Site-Wide Admins” who are the only ones who can moderated posts, comments, and activity streams… or we can ask others to help us but in the process we’re forced to give them an unnecessary amount of power (increasing the chance of accidental harm).

So I rest my case. I believe this is an issue that BP needs to address. BP needs to have a new “Site-wide Editor” user role that’s just below a “Site-Wide Editor”. Has anyone else considered this?

[@gene53 Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

I second that, moderators are a must.

Also, it would be great for the “Site-wide Admin” to be able to edit member’s profiles (including avatars).

Cheers,

Gene

[@andrea_r Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

I agree there is a need for a user role just under Site Admin.

I don’t think the BP team needs to address it though. I also think it should be plugin based.

User roles internal to WordPress are due for an overhaul, but it’s been pushed back a bit.

You could sort of tackle this via the Menus plugin for MU. That’d be a bit kludgey though.

[@pcwriter Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

“Role Scoper” plugin looks promising and seems like it would fit the bill. Also, the author states that the plugin api “provides some extensions to support integration with other plugins”.

What think you? Would this be compatible with BP?

[@bpisimone Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

This might also be a great solution here: http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/09/17/members-wordpress-plugin

I think it’s easily extensible, for example gravity forms uses it’s power:

Role Management Integration

Gravity Forms is compatible with Justin Tadlock’s Members plugin for role management. Have granular control over what users can and can’t do within Gravity Forms.

[@andrea_r Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

Well, I didn’t mention most of the current user role management plugins as they are mostly not aware of the site admin role and the subtleties therein.

[@anointed Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

I absolutely love the members plugin from Justin. It could potentially be the perfect solution to this problem. I also run communities of 50k-200k members, and have hundreds of moderators. The idea of giving any of them admin access is a non-starter for me. That is the primary reason I have not switched those sites from vb to wp yet.

[@djpaul Keymaster 14 years, 9 months ago]

On the roadmap for post-1.3, the team is going to look at WordPress user roles with a view to integrating them.

[@paulhastings0 Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

For reference.

BuddyPress Roadmap

Role Scoper plugin mentioned by @pcwriter

Members plugin mentioned by @Bpisimone

Like @Anointed mentioned, existing communities not running BP will never switch over to BP until there’s a solution like the one mentioned above. I would call this an issue that is preventing BP from spreading to larger existing communities.

Believe me, if I could code PHP then I would have already created this plugin months ago. Unfortunately I can’t. I’m still learning PHP as we speak but I have nowhere near the skill level required for this. Is there anyone here that feels they can do that and is willing to do so?

[@paulhastings0 Participant 14 years, 9 months ago]

@Andrea_r: Now that I think about it, the “Site-wide Admin” user role is actually something implemented by WPMU and not BP. So this is really more of a question to integrate “Site-wide Editors” into the WPMU core rather than the BP core.

So how would this “Site-wide Editor” role be affected by WP 3.0?