[wp-hackers] Suggestions on Exposing Plugin to End Users

[Stephen Rider]

I think if you control the End Users' "roles" properly, they won't  
even see the menu stuff that doesn't apply to them.

If you're doing a lot of custom functionality (which it sounds as  
though you are...) you might consider making a new top level menu for  
it.

You also might look into using the Role Manager plugin.  It allows you  
to create new user types, and control what specific abilities each  
type has.

See this page:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities
Be sure to see the "resources" section at the bottom for plugins.

Between those two, you should be able to completely control the end  
users' experience.  If certain users should only be doing a few  
specific things, then controlling Roles is the way to go.


Stephen



On Sep 8, 2008, at 1:54 AM, Mike Walsh wrote:

> For a while I have been working on a WordPress plugin which allows  
> WordPress
> to be used to manage a youth swim team.  Managing a swim team means  
> keeping
> track of a lot of data, some of which is collected from end users  
> (like
> swimmer names, ages, address, gender, etc.) and other information is  
> simply
> made available to the end users (meet results, swimmer time history,
> schedules, records, etc.)
>
> To date most of the work I have done has been via the Dashboard.   
> Users with
> Admin privileges can see and manipulate all of the swim team data and
> subscribers can see their own data, manipulate some of it, and see  
> data
> which has been deemed necessary for subscribers to see (e.g.  
> directions and
> maps to a swim meet).
>
> Currently I have all of the Swim Team admin functionality under the
> Dashboard Manage menu and all of the User interaction functionality  
> under
> the User menu.  For the most part this works fine (although the  
> Dashboard is
> slow) bu after playing with 2.7 and it's new menu structure, I am  
> not sure
> my usage model will continue to make sense.
>
> The Admin function works fine but the End user function doesn't have a
> logical home with the new menus.
>
> I have been wondering if there is a better (preferred?) way to  
> manage the
> user interaction?  I supposed I could generate a page when the  
> plugin is
> installed which contains the same content that the plugin displays  
> on the
> User screen but I am not sure what I give up by not going through the
> standard plugin path.