Daily Archives: August 28, 2009

Authors & Users

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Within the Authors & Users group, you have the ability to assign role-based permissions to different participants on your blog. The participants must be registered users of blogs.oregonstate.edu.

The five different roles are as followed:

  • Administrator: a user who has access to all of the administration features on your blogsite – grant this with extreme caution
  • Editor: a user who can publish posts, manage their own posts, as well as manage other people’s posts
  • Author: a user who can publish and manage their own posts only
  • Contributor: a user who can write and manage their own posts, but not publish them (these would have to be moderated by a higher role)
  • Subscriber: a user who can read comments, make comments, receive news letters, etc.

Go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities#Roles for a detailed explanation of each role’s permissions

To view the registered members of your blog, as well as their respective roles, from within your Dashboard, click on Users – this will automatically open up the Authors & Users list.

Users

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Blogs can sometimes grow to be quite busy, especially those blogs that may be run by an organization.

When this occurs, it’s a good idea to add pull in some extra assistance.

The Users feature provides the ability to add different users to your blog.  There also exist different permission levels for different types of Users who may work on your site.

Additionally, the Users menu group is where you can manage your own profile settings.

Akismet Configuration

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The Akismet Configuration feature allows you to automatically discard spam comments that come in on posts that are more than a month old.

Most “false positive” comments, those valid comments that Akisment erroneously marks as spam, occur on new posts.

Typically, older comments are targeted by spam agents as these posts “fall off your radar” after awhile – you’re just not as likely to return to posts that are six months old as the topic becomes exhausted.  When spam agents attack these areas, you will receive notification of this repeatedly within your spam queue, which can become an issue for large blogsites.

When this Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month option is enabled, these notifications will not appear in your queue – Akismet will just automatically delete the spam and not tell you about it.

Configure Akismet

To configure Akismet, do the following:

  • From within your Dashboard, click on Plugins > Akismet Configuration.
  • Select the Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month checkbox.
  • Click the Update Options button.

Installed Plugins

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There are four different Plugins that, by default, come with the blogs@oregonstate.edu WordPress installation:

  • Popularity Contest: enables ranking of your posts by popularity, using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity
  • Sociable: automatically adds links on your posts, pages, and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites
  • WP-Polls: Adds an AJAX polling system to your blog.
  • WP-PostRatings: adds an AJAX rating system for your blog’s post/page

Activate a Plugin

To activate a Plugin, do the following:

  • From within your Dashboard, click on Plugins. This will automatically open up a list of all installed Plugins.
  • Select the desired Plugin by clicking on its corresponding Activate link.
  • The background on the newly activated Plugin will change to white
  • Depending on the Plugin, a Settings link may also be made available.  Some Plugins may require configuration.  If a Settings link is available, click on it to go into the Settings and make any changes you desire.

Deactivate a Plugin

  • From within your Dashboard, click on Plugins to open your list.
  • Locate the Plugin to be deactivated and click on its corresponding Deactivate link.
  • The background on the newly deactivated Plugin will change to grey