[wp-hackers] Multisite Users and 500 Server Errors

[Jesse Friedman]

I have a rather large Multi-Site Network (over 500 websites).  We host all
our clients sites and also write for them. So I'm in a weird situation
where I need to provide editors and writers "super admin" like access.

However I don't want those users to have super admin rights.  We tried
using Extended Super Admins
http://wordpress.org/plugins/extended-super-admins/ which basically allows
you to take away capabilities from super admins which is nice but it
uncovered a flaw.

When you're a user on more than 50 or so sites on a WordPress network, the
server often fails at trying to serve up pages, especially
/wp-admin/network/users.php and wp-admin/network/sites.php, causing a 500
Server Error.  This isn't a problem for true Super Admins, because they
aren't technically users on any site.

The ESA plugin mentioned above makes you a user of every site you visit
(once you visit the site it makes you a user of that site so you can edit
the ESA options for that site) which if you have a small network is no big
deal. But eventually all my users end up getting 500 errors when the server
tries to identify all the sites they're a user of.

So I need help trying to figure out a workflow for my writers. They have
absolutely no reason to go into the Network area, edit sites, themes,
plugins etc... I trust all of them but at the same time it's just too much
access for them.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION

I'm thinking I could just keep a list of the writers in a file and hook
into all Network level saves and ask if user name == "johnd" do not allow
things to save. Then I can also user their username as a class in the body
tag and just use CSS and JavaScript to hide the entire dashboard.

Has anyone done anything like this?

Does anyone have a better solution?



-- 
thanks

*jesse friedman*
jes.se.com *
*
Book: Web Designers Guide to WordPress -
http://wdgwp.com/onamazon<http://wdgwp.com/onamazon>
Twitter: @professor <http://twitter.com/professor>
Facebook: Like<https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jesse-Friedman/204793299545174>