Roaring beast of a McLaren

sleek lines

whining engine

Sweeping through the roaring crod

• The comments column from the ‘All Posts’ list and the comments option from the ‘screen options’ drop-down have been removed.

Many thanks to Luke from High Lawn Primary for spotting the need for a plugin update for the WP 3.21 version

If you blog with Creative Blogs, the NorthantsBLT or Primary Blogger then you do not have to do anything as the plugin is already being installed on your sites 

For other interested parties, feel free to visit the Student Contributors Plugin Page.

• The ‘Right Now’ dashboard widget has also been removed for contributors. It adds little of value for student contributors and Askimet, when activated,  pushes summary links to comments through this widget. Thanks to Andrew Chadwick for taking the time to point this out.
• Removed the ‘Tools’ and ‘Profile’ menu items for contributors from the admin sidebar.

If you blog with Creative Blogs or the NorthantsBLT then you do not have to do anything as the plugin is already being installed on your sites  For other interested parties, feel free to visit the Student Contributors Plugin Page.

Many schools, classes and students are enjoying the benefits of using WordPress blogs in a myriad of ways for more engaging learning, teaching, communication and collaboration. Often pupils are given ‘contributor’ rights to allow them to write content that must first be approved by a teacher before being published and ‘going live’ to the world. This process generally works well but recently it came to my attention that a child logged in as a ‘contributor’ could also view the whole list of unmoderated site comments via the dashboard widgets or the links to the comments section in the menu bar. Although they could not approve these comments and publish them, they could still view potentially unsuitable input before it was dealt with appropriately by the teacher’s moderation processes.

Therefore, I’ve recently spent some time pulling together a plugin that removes the ability for ‘contributors’ to view any comments via dashboard widgets and also removes removes the link to comments in the menu navigation bar. My initial fix built on an existing plugin and took these features away for all levels of user but the brilliant John McLear spent time tidying up the code and limiting the effect of this plugin to ‘contributors, leaving other user roles unaffected.

I worked on this with the WordPress multisite set-up in mind, mainly because existing plugins might do the job on a single site but would not transfer their settings across to other sites when network-installed. This potentially meant installing the plugin on hundreds of individual sites. The Student Contributor plugin removes this as an issue as it can be network activated and will only impact on the pupils set up as ‘contributors.’ In fact, I think the new contributor’s dashboard is less cluttered and more useful for use by children. Here’s the dashboard view for a ‘contributor’ with the plugin installed.

In summary, if you have a self-hosted individual or multisite wordpress blog and have pupils set up as contributors then the Student Contributor Dashboard plugin is worth using for extra peace-of-mind that students are not exposed to any unsuitable comments.

If you blog with Creative Blogs, PrimaryBlogger, or the NorthantsBLT then you do not have to do anything as the plugin is already being installed on your sites For other interested parties, feel free to visit the plugin page, read the instructions and download it.