Last month was my first month trying Free-For-All-Friday on this site, and although I’m thinking that doing it this month might be a mistake, let’s talk out how it’s done.
FFAF is a silly little meme where people open the registration on their site for a day, and allow anybody who comes along to post whatever post they like. This is done by creating a temporary guest account and publishing the username and password on the blog, or by allowing open registration publishing in the blogging tool.
I’m not sure how the Movable-Typers who started FFAF do it, but WordPressers of version 1.5 can make open registration publishing easy and temporary, if they understand how it works.
As a WordPress administrator in version 1.2, you’ve been able to enable open registration. Unfortunately, newly registered posters couldn’t post anything until they had been promoted to a higher user level. To address this, there’s a new setting in the administrative options.
First, you need to have the setting enabled for open registration. Check on the Options | General tab of the WordPress administration panel. There is a checkbox labeled “Anyone can register”. Turn that puppy on.
Next, you’ll want to allow newly registered users to post. Check out the Options | Writing page in the administrative panel. The new option for WordPress 1.5 is that “Newly registered members” radio button set.
The top option, “Cannot write articles”, is the default. With that option set, new members can’t do squat. Their user levels are set to 0, which is basically allows them to stare mindlessly at their user profile in the WordPress admin console and nothing else.
The next two options are a little different. If either of these options are set when a user registers, that user will be granted user level 1. User level 1 is a little different from level 0 in that you can now write posts and save them as drafts.
If you set the option “May submit drafts for review”, newly registered users must save their posts in Draft or Private mode. These drafts won’t appear on the public blog until someone with a higher user level approves them. There is no Publish button for level 1 users who are enabled under this setting.
If you set the option “May publish articles”, then users with the user level 1 will be able to publish their posts to the live blog just by pushing the publish button at the bottom of the post.
Interestingly, you can revoke publishing privileges from level 1 users by setting the option from “May publish articles” back to “Cannot write articles”. Yet, because these users are still level 1, they will still be able to write drafts. If you want to completely remove the ability from these users for writing posts, you’ll have to manually demote their user level on the Users | Authors & Users page.
All of this is great for FFAF, because you can simply turn on these options for the day, then turn them off when you’re done. If you don’t care about the possibility of stray draft posts, you don’t need to mess with the user permissions on the new users.
One other trouble with FFAF is the category. I prefer that all of my FFAF posts from visiting users go into the FFAF category. Usually when a user sees the posting page in WordPress, they have access to every category in the system. That’s why I wrote the Limit Categories plugin.
Limit Categories lets you limit the categories that low-level users see in the admin console. You’ll have to make changes in the plugin file (near the top) to set the categories you want to appear, but after that, you just drop it into your plugins directory and activate it.
One final note about doing this with categories: You might also want to temporarily change the default posting category to a category that your guest authors can see. That way, when they forget to select a category, it ends up somewhere appropriate. When you’re done for the day, don’t forget to set it back.
So now that you know how to bend WordPress to your will, I expect you to check out FFAF and get to some contributing - Make new friends and write your brains out.
