I’m a stay-at-home’r. After being offered to build my work’s site, I gave it a go despite being a complete novice.
Once I decided to go down the CMS route and ultimately decided on WordPress as the back-end of choice, I entered unknowingly into the vast world of plugins. I’ve tried so many, I’ve lost count of the numbers installed and immediately uninstalled.
A quick background of the organisation the site is for: it comprises of members and other companies and organisations who deal with potentially sensitive issues and documents relating to these issues. Since it’s a member-based organisation, it presented some interesting — but not unusual — challenges for the site build. There are large areas of the site which need to remain private. Within these private areas, are subsections which are also restricted to certain members only. Layers upon layers of privacy and user permissions and registration requirements. Quite a bit of fiddling around was involved.
Anyhow, on to the praise of some very worthy WordPress CMS plugins:
One of the best I’ve found which allows for some very fine customisation of user roles and permissions is Role Scoper. You’ll find it very hard to come across any other plugin that offers the level of support its creator, Kevin does. He’s a plugin genius. This powerful plugin takes basic WordPress user permission functionality and makes it usable for real sites. Role Scoper enables you to create user groups, pages, posts and categories with different permissions; my site could not exist without this plugin … seriously. It goes far beyond what I require for my own site, but it’s nice to know it’s there in case I need to utilise more of its advanced features. I can’t say enough nice things about Role Scoper.
Another that slots very nicely with Role Scoper is a user registration plugin called Register Plus by Skullbit. It takes the user registration page and makes it completely customisable. Allowing you to add fields, ReCaptcha and all sorts of other goodies that make your site more your own and less like a WordPress blog. Another great plugin for websites allowing you to lock down your site can also be found courtesy of Skullbit.
Need a forum for your site? Simple: Press Forum is the answer. Works flawlessly, offers a vast amount of features similar to phpBB forum. Exactly what I needed for my site.
More to come…
Yup, this post is proof your blog name is appropriate. hehe
*grin* Thanks! ; P Going back and reading it, I do sound like a real nerd, eh?
Role Scoper and Register Plus look like just what I’m looking for. I’m new to WordPress, coming from dotnethnuke. What can you tell me about the reliabulity/stablity etc. of these plugins? I’d hate to cause problems on my WP site.