I do realize the irony of requesting Wordpress help on a Blogger blog. With that out there, let's forge ahead.
My other blog, ecochick, features environmentally friendly products and programs available in Canada. However, since the whole Project Raise A Child started around here, ecochick has not gotten a whole lot of love. Which sucks. It's a great little blog doing a great thing. So, I'm going to kick my own butt to do something that I've been wanting to do for a while, which is to cast a net far and wide and find some awesome women who want to become part of a team of ecochick contributors. Awesome!
However, in order to do this I am going to have to move ecochick off Blogger. While Blogger is an excellent platform, it does have technical limitations - one of which being the fact that I cannot add contributors in the way I'd like to. I'd like to have contributors write and submit blog posts complete with images and links, with me then being the ultimate control freak able to edit posts if necessary and in charge of determining when things will get posted. Blogger will only allow me to add authors who can publish directly, which isn't what I want. Wordpress does allow this, and since I'm already paying hosting with Netfirms which includes a Wordpress installation, I might as well just use what's available.
However, Wordpress doesn't quite do what I want either. From what I can see, I can add "contributors" or "authors". Contributors are almost exactly what I want - people can write posts and submit them, and I then have ultimate posting and editing control. However, Contributors do not appear to have the ability to upload images. I've checked out the roles, and basically, what I want to do is add the capability to upload_files to the role of Contributor. And that's where my geekiness ends, because I don't know how or if I can do that.
So I ask the intertubes, people who know more about this stuff than me. Am I able to change the Contributor role to add the ability to upload files? How do I do that?
8 things to say:
Was looking into this type of thing once upon a time myself. Unless things have changed in the last year or two, WordPress roles are predefined and locked into those definitions.
However, if you're self hosting, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find a plugin to do what you want. They make plugins for pretty much everything. And they're pretty easy to install and activate (ease of use for each plugin is a crapshoot though, depends on plugin author).
Can you host the images on Flickr and copy and paste the code straight into your Wordpress posts? Would that work?
(That's what I do on my blog. Self-hosting all of my images would cost me in bandwidth. )
@joe - thanks. That's what I'm looking in to now.
@missfish - thanks for the suggestion! It's not bandwidth I'm worried about though, it's the simple ability of having the contributors add the images themselves without having to send them to me to do it, KWIM? Your solution would work if they could do it themselves, but then it gets all sticky with "where" they get the images from and blah.
Why not do this:
1: Share a Google Doc folder. (Blog Submissions). Give certian people full control. This will allow them to add text,photos, links yada yada to a document.
2. Don't give them SHARE permission.
3. When happy use Share>publish doc>to blog site
4. Send Steve a six pack
Use Google Mobile Apps to do this on the move.
Thoughts?
Hmm. You might be smarter than you look, Colonel.
Pfft that would take much. Shall I repeat that you know this guy that has zero to do all day thats really good with this intranetty thingy. I know your busy watching the exciting Olympic curling and probably can't think straight. ;-)
wouldn't take much. Damn medication
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