[wp-hackers] "commenter" user role

[Jeremy Clarke]

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Stephen Rider <wp-hackers at striderweb.com> wrote:
> The ONLY thing I see as a possible advantage to commenters as Users in core is the idea of themes being designed with a page that shows all of a commenter's comments. However, that could be covered with something like a custom template within the plugin, or a.. shortcode maybe?... that could be put into the content of a regular old Page.

I might be missing something but I can't think of any reason why the
author.php<-archive.php driven user profile pages couldn't take care
of this inside a theme. Use open registration to register commenters
then use their author page to show their comments.

The only block is the annoying /author/ permalink format that would
need to be overridden with a filter or plugin to be something like
/users/ (an important but seperate issue imho).

Obviously this would be a fairly complicated process but one plugin
could manage it all with a couple of template tags for the author.php
template and some widgets/shortcodes to show the lists of commenters.

What's really missing is a filled out API for managing users in
WordPress. There is no get_users() function and there is no way to say
"fetch users in $x role". This makes a plugin like the one I described
very difficult to produce without writing a lot of low-level logic and
DB queries, but these problems would apply to this proposed system as
well, with the added complications of all the commenter-specific logic
that would need to be added to core.

As has been said what's needed is to tweak the users system to be more
functional and do what needs doing to handle a functional 'commenter'
role, not adding a meta-class outside the roles system specifically
for managing comment authors.

-- 
Jeremy Clarke | http://jeremyclarke.org
Code and Design | http://globalvoicesonline.org