Recently I posted about a Wordpress issue that I needed to get sorted;

One of my blogs is ripe to turn into a community blog on which people can sign up as an author and then post into their own “category”.

Basically my idea was to allow people to sign up as an author, then link their author name to a category. Then allow them to post ONLY to that category. Easy, right…

Beeeeeppppppp. Wrong.

It really was not easy at all. For starters, my idea about using categories was a no-go as I wanted the site URLs to be like this;

http://www.mysite.com/dave/post.html

but when using categories, Wordpress automatically pre-pends the word "category" into the permalink, thus it would actually be;

http://www.mysite.com/category/dave/post.html

Well, that was the first problem I needed to get sorted. As I am in no way a Wordpress Expert, this took some time but eventually I found a plugin which does exactly this - Top Level Categories from fortes.com. Once "plugged in" and activated, this works exactly as I require

Next up, I needed to link a categories to an Author. This was more problematic as I found no plugin already completed

After much searching I found "user extra" and "user meta". These give the ability to "assign" information to a User. Once plugged in and activated, I was able to assign category to author (using the "Allow these locked categories" setting in manage > Extra User Data)…

Well this worked great, except that it would be impossible to keep updating the Categories that the Author is NOT allowed to post to. After all, each time I add a new Category for a new Author I would have had to update every Author so that all the existing Authors had no posting rights in the new category. Does that make sense?

As I am a bit of a PHP Hacker, I delved into the murky underbelly and came to see that the two options for category posting by author; "allowed" and "disallowed" are simply compared to each other in a simple array. With a bit of jiggery pokery I amended that compare to just check inside the "allowed" array, and only show those categories whilst the Author is logged in. Sounds more complicated than it is.

Suffice to say that I now have a working example of what I want to do, so it's full steam ahead for my new community blog. I hope to get a lot of authors on board. I'll update as time goes by.

Conclusion

Get me a Beer, someone, please.