Improving WP User Management

I have been trying to improve WP User Management, currently I don’t believe that the core WP will be updated anytime soon to include these features but, I think enough people want them that they can be extremely useful. A lot of different robust CMS have these features built-in and I think WP should too.

There are a variety of Membership plugins for WP but, most of them are for paysites and working with PayPal, which while nice, focuses on the wrong aspect of user management and user access control.

We have a couple of plugins that accomplish different parts of what I think is a “perfect” user management system. It is as follows:

1. User Profiles
Extending the existing User Profile to allow for custom fields, so you have say 4 default fields (username, password, email address, usergroup) then you can extend those with custom fields to have whatever other profile info you want (address,phone,city,state,etc)

2. Registration / Sign Up
When a user registers, you can choose in the admin panel whether they are instantly logged in and have access or, you can moderate the user and require admin approval before access is granted, say if you need to verify information they submit on sign-up. WP is now used by small businesses, corporations, colleges and even governments, so its feasible. The other aspect if that you can send out an email letting the user know, they have signed up and either they are approved, awaiting approval or banned because they submitted incorrect information. The emails could be customizable depending on what you wanted to tell the user.

3. Usergroups
With Access Control, this is the main part where you can create users who have access to different parts of the system, they can create, edit, delete or view data, then you specify which group can do what and each user can be part of more than one usergroup.

4. Template tags
This is the part where the forms for logging in and signing up are either a default theme PHP file like 404.php, which you can customize or they are a snippet of code that can be embedded anywhere you want, in posts, pages or even templates via a system variable or a PHP variable (i.e. <?php $this->Form(“signup”); ?>.

5. Restricted Content
With the system in place you can create content that is protected and viewable only by users who are registered and have access to view that content. So if you are a regular member you can access the site except for one section, which is for premium members or for the development team, where you can share files and documents that you uploaded. If you try to access you are denied and presented with a login screen or if you already logged in, it says you are unauthorized to view this content at your level.

See, that pretty easy I think, I just don’t know the WP system and hook well enough to code it.

Its frustrating because a lot of current plugins accomplish parts of these and not everything together.

Some of the plugins I speak of:
– New User Email Set Up
– Confirm User Registration
– Extended User Profile
– User Photo
– WP User Registration
– User Permissions
– New User Approve
– User Access Manager
– User Login Wiget
– Cimy User Extra Fields
– WP User Defaults
– WordPress Users

These plugins all accomplish varying degrees of User Management that I spoke of, now if they could all get together and combine the best features and functions, we would have a real plugin that could be submitted as an Official WP Plugin like Askimet.