NC@WP

That’s not particularly difficult, but a plugin would only work in the content area of the page. If you want to do it elsewhere (in a sidebar or the header or the footer), you’d have to modify your theme instead. Also, you need to specify very precise rules (the kind a computer could follow) for cutting excerpts out of complete page content.

WordPress is so much more today!

Indeed it is, but many architectural decisions were made well before today… :)

Personal = 1 user then why have a user management interface?

Because you still need to manage Contributors (users who are only allowed to comment on posts rather than compose their own).

that still give me a problem about how to protect my media against stupid users

That’s not a very dificult problem. I already suggested one possible solution above: do a daily (heck, hourly, if you’re so inclined) incremental back-up of your uploads directory and restore periodically. Whatever media has been uploaded will be backed up; if it is ever deleted (accidentally or otherwise), it will be restored in a pretty short order.

If you tried setting up the second blog to work off the first blog’s database, you were going with option 2, not 3. Not all hosting companies would allow this setup; many hosting companies set restrictive permissions on the location of the DB client (i.e., they only allow clients to connect from certain IP addresses).

To set up option 3, you need to set up the second blog completely independently from the first. Then, on the first blog, you need to have an RSS feed for the category you want to export into the second blog (this functionality is there already; try acessing mystandardblog.com/category/X/feed; it should produce a feed for category X), and on the second blog, a plugin that would import this feed (FeedWordPress should do the trick).

There is no alternative if you’re hosting on Yahoo!. On Yahoo! servers, .htaccess files are forbidden and pretty permalinks will only work if you install (a Yahoo!-patched version of) WordPress via Yahoo! Web Hosting interface. Last I checked, they have not yet patched 2.5.1 to work on their servers, so if you install WordPress via Yahoo! Web Hosting interface, you’ll get 2.3.something.

Er, yes what? Do you need subdirectories or subdomains?

If you need subdirectories, all you need to do is to go to Options | Permalinks in your admin interface and create this (or similar) custom permalink structure:

/%author%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

This will give you URLs like

site.com/author1/2008/06/12/post-title

If you need subdomains, you can either create them manually and install a separate copy of WordPress on each subdomain or install a single copy of WordPress MU, which will handle subdomains for you (if your hosting setup allows it, that is).

The question is meaningless as asked. Is it your way of saying you want to give each author a subdirectory (site.com/author1, site.com/author2, etc.) or a subdomain (author1.site.com, author2.site.com, etc.)?

There are at least three ways of doing it I can imagine:

1. Solve the whole thing on the Apache level by rewriting mysitenet.com/* to mystandardblog.com/category/X/*.
2. Deploy two copies of WordPress storing data in the same database. mystandardblog.com would be a regular blog, while mysitenet.com would have a specially tweaked theme designed to display only one category.
3. Deploy two regular and independent copies of WordPress, but install FeedWordPress or similar plugin on mysitenet.com and configure it to import the Category X feed from mystandardblog.com.

Indeed. Something like this:

<?php
  if ('' == $user_ID) {
    // user not logged in
    if (!is_defined('AD_SHOWN')) {
?>
<div id="myAd">
  <!-- Ad goes here... -->
</div>
<?php
      define('AD_SHOWN', true);
    }
  }
?>

Thanks for clarification, HandySolo!

what part of the script tells WordPress to show the ad under JUST the first post on the page?

When the first post is displayed, AD_SHOWN is not yet defined, so !is_defined('AD_SHOWN') evaluates to true and the ad can be displayed. After the ad is displayed, AD_SHOWN is defined, so !is_defined('AD_SHOWN') evaluates to false and no more ads are shown…

This is way easier to do from outside WordPress… Create one page, note its ID, and then clone it to your heart’s content via a freeform PHP script or an SQL batch file… Something along the lines of:

<?php 

// Let's pretend that connection to the DB server
// has been established and the DB selected...

$myPageID = 1234;
$myPostsTable = 'wp_posts';
$select = "SELECT * FROM {$myPostsTable} WHERE ID = '$myPageID'";
$myResult = mysql_query($select);
$myPage = mysql_fetch_assoc($myResult);
while ($morePagesNeeded) {
  $myNewPage = $myPage;
  $myNewPage['post_content'] = 'Content of the Page.';
  $myNewPage['post_title'] = 'Page title';
  $myNewPage['post_name'] = 'page-slug';
  $myNewPage['guid'] = 'https://www.example.com/pages/page-slug';
  $firstField = true;
  $insert = "INSERT INTO {$myPostsTable} SET ";
  foreach ($myNewPage as $key => $value) {
    if (strtoupper($key) == 'ID') {
      continue;
    }
    if ($firstField) {
      $insert .= $key
        . " = '"
        . mysql_real_escape_string($value)
        . "'";
      $firstField = false;
    } else {
      $insert .= ', '
        . $key
        . " = '"
        . mysql_real_escape_string($value)
        . "'";
    }
  }
  mysql_query($insert);
}

?>

Obviously, the fields in $myNewPage will have to be populated from somewhere (CSV file or perhaps constructed dynamically) and $morePagesNeeded has to be replaced with some realistic condition, but I hope you get the picture…

Exactly as written in the code. ??

First, WordPress would check if the user is logged in.

Then, assuming the user is not logged in, every time WordPress renders a post, it would check if a constant named AD_SHOWN is defined. If it’s not (meaning, it’s the first post being rendered), WordPress would display the ad and define the constant. When posts past first are rendered, the constant will already be defined, so no additional ad displays will take place.

What about having users puplishing their own stuff without editing or deleting other peoples blogs?

Can Role Manager help with this?

You don’t need Role Manager for that. Designating a user as Author allows her to publish her material, but not to edit or delete other users’ material (with the exception of media files, of course). Role Manager would help you if you needed some non-standard roles or wanted to change the permissions for a role already defined.

Hmmm if a person use media in a blog it dosent matter if they delete it in the media gallary does it? it will still be part of the authors post/Blog right? but “just” removed from the library correct?

No. When media files are removed from the gallery, they are deleted from disk. So any posts displaying media that was deleted will show dead links instead.

I am new to wordpress but already hitting some limitations like this I really didnt expect from such a great peace of software with 10000 of plugins

If you read WordPress materials carefully, you will notice that even its developers characterize it as a “personal publishing system” or “personal publishing platform”. Note the word “personal“; collaboration was deliberately de-emphasized in WordPress to make its deployment and operation easier for a less technologically adept user. There are products out there that are built on a different set of premises (Drupal comes to mind), but they are substantially more complex.

lovelytee11,

I know a lot about css and html

That’s not enough; you need to understand PHP programming as well. Read up on theme development.

jonimueller,

it seems folly to allow all users to be able to muck around in the media gallery.

It is folly, but that’s the way WordPress is designed. Media files are different from posts and Pages in that there is no ownership information attached to them…

You can’t. WordPress’ permission system is not that finely granulated. Disk space (and images written on it) are shared property, unlike posts/Pages, which are written into the database…

jonimueller suggested the Role Manager plugin, but I don’t think it can help in your situation. Check out this screenshot: the Role Manager allows you only to allow or forbid uploading files.

One possible solution is not to rely on WordPress for maintaining your media files. It should be possible to back up your uploads directory and restore it using either utilities provided by your hosting company or a backup utility residing on your home/office computer. So even if a hapless author does delete a file or seven, they would be restored from backup in a short order…