[alanchrishughes]

I just started reading up on buddypress this weekend and I’m considering using this for a website whose main audience would be younger kids and teenagers. I want to limit their roles to authors, I don’t want them trying to edit too much or have too much to be confused by. Is there a built in setting for this? Right now I think by default they are full admins unless you go in afterward and manually change their role.

[designodyssey]

There’s a default in WP admin screens to set the default role for new members. However, if you want different roles for different groups, that’ll be tougher. Search around these parts for “user types” or similar to find the answer to that one.

[alanchrishughes]

Where at? I’ve looked all over.

[modemlooper]

When users sign up to BP they are only subscribers.

[alanchrishughes]

Maybe for the main website’s blog, but for their own blog they are automatically admins. And is there a way to set a default theme?

[alanchrishughes]

Is this not possible with this version of buddypress?

[alanchrishughes]

I’ve been looking for some plugins to do this but no luck.

[jalien]

Actually thanks for the post. This is a something I have been doing (trying to do) since wpmu 1.0. I use WPMU / Buddypress with young (elementary school students 6-12 years old) so simplicity is a must. The New Blog Options plugin (if it works as it says it will) would make make perfect customization possible. Here are a list of WPMU plugins that I use or have used that might help. I am in the process of retrying everything to achieve exactly what you are trying to do. Let everyone on the forums know how your testing goes. Hope this isn’t too long. I added links to save time since there are sometimes plugins with similar names).

New Blog Options – this one is fairly new (still beta), and I haven’t tried it extensively yet, but it will allow you to clone on blog setup with it’s plugin options etc. to all new blogs.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/default-blog-options/

Limit Blogs per User – if you don’t want them making more than one blog (set to 2, one is the main buddypress blog and 2 is their own blog)

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-blogs-per-user/

WPMU New Blog Defaults – this will allow you to restrict menus, change default links, etc under the Options in the Site Admin menu

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpmu-new-blog-defaults/

Members – this one takes over where the old Role-manager plugin left off. Haven’t had time to check it out yet, but if you could use this with New Blog Options it would allow you to very finally tune what your users could do and see.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members/

Adminimize – again I haven’t played with this for a while, but if you could use it with New Blog Options, then you could simplify the look of the menus for your users too.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adminimize/

Default User Role – will set the user role when a new blog is created

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpmu-default-user-role/

Plugin Manager – does what it says, allows you to manage which plugins users can set, which ones are automatically turned on, and which regular users cannot see

http://wpmudev.org/project/wpmu-plugin-manager

download link is: http://wpmudev.org/download/946613807_mp-plugin-manager.php

Of course with young people you might want to consider a privacy plugin like:

More Privacy Options – this doesn’t work with the feed on Buddypress, but if you search the forums it can be made to work or you can use the following plugin for feed privacy (Buddypress privacy should be coming soon)

http://wpmudev.org/project/More-Privacy-Options/

download link is: http://wpmudev.org/download/999830698_ds_private_blog.php

BP MPO Activity Filter – This plugin, BP MPO Activity Filter, does just what the name suggests: it filters BuddyPress activity feeds. Used with More Privacy Options.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-mpo-activity-filter/

[alanchrishughes]

Wow! Thats a lot of plugins. I’ve tried some of them already with no luck, but I will have to give the rest a try and see what happens. Like I said though all I am really looking for is new blogs to be automatically set as author accounts.

[alanchrishughes]

Well I’ve gone through all of those plugins and none of them are capable.

[jalien]

It’s not any one plugin that does the job. Here’s how I do it.

Create a new blog (let’s call it Test) and set the privacy (more privacy options needed here and bp-mpo-activity-filter to keep it’s content out of the stream) to “only blog admins can see this blog” (this is necessary, but keeps things clean since nothing should get added to this blog).

Use new-blog-defaults to set the blog defaults including menus that the users cannot use.

Members is used to set capabilities of the admin (I don’t change the role of the new blog just the admin’s capabilities) so the admin is “like” an editor or author, but I can still let them change their themes (theme changing is very important to young users).

Wpmu-plugin-manager lets you set which plugins to allow users to use and which ones are automatically turned on (I always turn on Ozh’s Admin Menus for example). Turn on any plugins you want to use and tweek their settings and any other blog settings.

Then Adminimize to further hide menus the users don’t need (it only hides menus, but most users will never find them anyway). Adminimize is great for simplifying the write panels for posts and pages too. Any plugins I don’t want users to change settings on I can make sure they don’t have access to by making sure the menus are hidden.

Now use new-blog-options under the site admin menu and give it the blog id of Test and check off any of the database fields you want new blogs to have (make sure the Members and Adminimize ones are checked). Maybe this isn’t exactly what you want, but it is probably the best overall way to simplify blogs for younger users.

Also since I use these with classes, I just import my whole list from a spreadsheet using DD Import Users as subscribers on the main blog. I use limit-blogs-per-user and set the site-admin/options to 2. Now users can create their own blog, but can only create one blog of their own. This saves me a lot of time, but still gives the users a fair amount of freedom with their blogs.

It isn’t a perfect solution. I would like to see some of the overlapping capabilities put into one plugin for cloning blogs. I would especially like to see the ability to have different templates (ie base blogs to clone from) so that I could have one setup for say grade 1 students and another setup for grade 5 students.

Hope this is useful to someone.

[alanchrishughes]

I think I finally follow what you are trying to say. But for the last 4 years I have ran a full admin news blog for our group and want to keep my account set to normal. Using this cloning plugin, wouldn’t that remove all the options from myself as well?