Student Contributor’s Dashboard Plugin v1.2

Summary
This plugin removes dashboard widgets for users set up as ‘contributors’ – leaving only ‘QuickPress’ – and removes ‘comments’, ‘tools’ and ‘profile’ menu items from the admin sidebar. It also removes the comments column from the ‘All Posts’ list and the comments option from the ‘screen options’ drop-down.

Student Contributors

It is designed specifically for use with WordPress multi-site set-ups in education where pupils have been added as ‘contributors‘. It provides a simple way of removing the widgets and links to pending and unmoderated comments on the dashboard when logged in. An unsavoury comment – not yet moderated by teacher – could be read by a student. With this plugin enabled, all comments are removed from view. Higher levels of user capability (authors, editors and administrators) will have normal access to the full dashboard features when logged in.

This plugin was specifically designed for the Creative Blogs school blogging set-ups, that need a plugin that can be easily network activated. It should also be noted that other brilliant plugins with much more finely-grained control are available for single site set-ups and as soon as these work well across a multisite set-up,  this plugin may become redundant. Until then it might just do the trick for you.

Credits

This plugin builds upon the ‘Remove WP Dashboard Widgets’ plugin by Andrew Billits and Ulrich Sossou of the excellent WPMU Dev – http://premium.wpmudev.org/ I’ve got a subscription there and so should you, if you are serious about setting up and running a WordPress Multisite. It is released under the conditions of the original GNU General Public License (Version 2 – GPLv2).

John McLear contributed some key elements of the code - http://mclear.co.uk for Primary Blogger http://primaryblogger.co.uk His knowledge and advice was invaluable.

Installation
  • Download the plugin file
  • Unzip the file into a folder on your hard drive
  • Upload /student-contributor/ folder to /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your site
  • Visit Network Admin -> Plugins and Network Activate it there to activate on all sites

Download – Student Contributor’s Dashboard Plugin – v1.2