Behind The Blog

A few days ago, someone wrote to ask me about what I consider “best practices” in managing user accounts on a WordPress MU installation. Recently this person had set up a new WPMU server with a number of different blogs. In the rush to get it operational the system administrator had just set up a single user account with rights to all the blogs and given the username and password out to something like ten different people who published posts.

I got the impression that the person who contacted me wasn’t sure this was the best plan and was looking for any confirmation of that. I wrote back but then thought I’d share my reasons here as well.

For starters, no, it’s definitely NOT a good idea to have a bunch of people using the same WPMU user account.

Definitely.

Not.

Several reasons:

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1. SECURITY – If one of the authors leaves the company, or you decide to terminate one of them, that person will know the username/password. You’ll need to change the password and then get the new password out to all the other posters. Much easier if you give everyone their own username and password. Then if you need to part ways with someone, you just disable that one account from being able to login and you are done.

2. AUDITING – What happens if a post goes up that was not supposed to? Or was offensive or plagarized? How do you know WHO was the one who published that post? With a group of people sharing the login you don’t have an easy way of finding out who published the post in question. Perhaps you can try to correlate IP addresses with login sessions or something like that, but it’s hard to get right. If everyone has their own account, you know who published any particular post because a name is associated with it.

3. AVAILABILITY – What happens if one of the group resets the password? Or what if there is some database problem and the single account gets disabled? Suddenly no one can access the blog site. Far better to have the multiple accounts so that authors can still get into the site if there is a problem with one of the accounts.

4. APPEARANCE – If you have a community of blogs with one user account, all posts are going to be from that one user, which would certainly give me the perception that it’s not really that big of a “community” of blogs. With multiple accounts publishing the posts, your sites will look like they have more contributors to the individual blogs – which, in fact, they do. There is also a transparency/authenticity element to this, too, in that people can come to understand more easily that there are different authors on your site with different writing styles.

5. OWNERSHIP – Sort of going along with #2, if everyone publishes posts under their own name, I would believe that there is a bit more of an incentive for them to be sure that the posts are accurate with regard to spelling, etc. If it’s under “someone’s” name, there isn’t as strong a sense of ownership – but if it is your name, even just your first name, there is a bit more ownership at a psychological level.

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For me personally, point #1 alone carries the day and is why I assign individual user accounts to everyone who writes on this site. I don’t expect anyone to leave (but do we ever?)… I expect them to be here a long time… but if I want to disable someone’s access to this server, I want to be able to do it on an individual basis. My point #2 is big for me, too, as I want to be able to know who makes what changes to the site.

Sure, if you have a network of blogs, it may take a few more minutes to set up new user accounts and assign them to each of the blogs… but we’re talking minutes, not hours or days. A small investment that can have a big payoff later.

What about you? Do you assign everyone individual user accounts? For the same reasons I outline? Or do you have additional reasons?

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Related posts:

1. Upgrading to WordPress 2.6.2…
2. Adding the “Unfiltered MU” plugin to WordPress MU to allow all embeds
3. WordTwit – a great way to tweet posts from WordPress MU
4. Connecting WordPress MU to Twitter to auto-tweet new blog posts
5. Adding video comments to WPMU using Seesmic’s new plugin

Tags: Security, WordPress, wordpressmu, WPMU

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