Shopping list of plugins/workarounds for large sites

Hi,

I have a large blog (4,200 posts, 2,700 users, 20,000 comments) that is currently running on a hacked-out version of 1.5. I’d really like to upgrade to WordPress 2, but I don’t want to have to go through the whole hacking thing again — it’d be much better to rely on plugins for what we’re doing.

I have a moderate amount of experience with PHP so I can either write stuff myself (or attempt), or modify other plugins. However, I haven’t had a good look round and I’m not sure where to start.

The site allows anyone to register in order to comment or submit posts. We have a number of editors who would either publish them or send them back to the poster. We don’t permit authors to edit comments though we do allow them the option of not permitting comments on their own posts. We don’t make use of TrackBack, and we would like to use some sort of ratings plugin that is restricted only to members and can’t be ballot-stuffed.

So, I’d like to be able to do the following, ideally with plugins.

– Replace or modify the users list so that it’s paginated. At the moment it craps out around ‘D’ thanks to PHP execution limits, and if someone forgot their email address and password, I need to fix it for them in phpMyAdmin.

– We have a need for something like a fourth post status, ‘bounce’. This is for items that we have rejected for publishing and need to return to the user for modification; we need to either list these separately in the Manage area or highlight them so people are aware that it needs attention. In the 1.5 site I have in fact hacked in this fourth status, which was a really silly thing to do and in retrospect should have been done with post_meta. However, I’m not sure how to start on that.

I’ve installed Owen Winkler’s Role Manager, the Draft Control plugin, and Custom Admin Menu.

– At the moment our hacked up Manage screen treats private posts as a draft that you don’t want an editor to look at yet, and lists them before your drafts. I’d like to replicate this behaviour.

– I’d like to restrict the interface for contributors. I don’t want them to be able to add password protection or change any of the post_meta through the usual interface (I’ve already written a plugin to expose just the fields I want). I do want them to be able to upload images and add excerpts. This was previously done with userlevel hacks to edit-form.php. I now have the Role Manager plugin installed but am not 100% sure on how to use the custom capabilities, or indeed if this is even the right way to go about it.

– I’d like to alter the Manage screen so that drafts are treated differently. Since there are normally about 50 of contributors’ drafts, the Draft Control plugin is great for this. However, now that’s in place I need to get rid of the comma delimited list at the top.

– For one’s own drafts and private posts, I’d like to list these in a table, more like the way the recent posts are listed. I need to be able to highlight that ‘bounced’ status if they have it.

– I’d like to alter the Manage screen for contributors, so that only their posts appear on that page.

– Finally, I would like some whipped cream on that cake that I’m having and eating too. ??

At the moment I’m looking into writing a massive pile of plugins to entirely replace things like the post form, but I’m not really confident of what I’m doing there yet.

If anyone has any wisdom about any of these points I’d be immensely grateful.