I’m currently building a multi-user Wordpress based website. The users are divided in groups, which all have certain privileges. The control mostly concerns the backend, or the dashboard of Wordpress. It’s relatively straightforward to disable the users’ ability to edit pages by using a role and capability plugin like Members. But what if the user should be able to edit certain pages only? All of the pages have been created beforehand by an administrator group. In that case it’s useful to show just the page or pages which a user group can edit.

I tried a couple of plugins, but most of them are about hiding pages and posts on the public site. The few for the dashboard like Manage your posts only show the posts an author has written for the author only. In my case the author is another person, so that’s not applicable.

By using the code from the Manage your posts plugin (It’s really just a function you can include in your functions.php) as a base I was able to make it show only certain page or pages to certain user groups. The capabilities have been set with Members.

function edit_page_per_capability($query) {
if ( strpos( $_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ], '/wp-admin/edit-pages.php' ) !== false ) {
   if (current_user_can('organizer')) {
      $query->set('post__in', array(184,186) );
   }
   elseif ( current_user_can( 'instructor' ) ) {
      $query->set('page_id', '186');
   }
   elseif ( current_user_can( 'office' ) ) {
      $query->set('page_id', '8');
   }
}
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','edit_page_per_capability');

The numbers point to specific pages which the user groups are supposed to edit. On the page list the groups see only what they are allowed to. For more options check out query_posts from the Wordpress Codex. With a minimal effort you can have it to point to pages by their real names, so the code becomes more descriptive. For Wordpress 3.0 and onwards you need to change the URL in the code (it should point to Pages in the dashboard menu).

You can use the code on your page by adding it to your functions.php file and modifying it to suit your purposes.

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I don’t know how long the operations at the BP oil spill site are going to take, but they can be followed via live feeds from underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROV) working at the site. I’ve collected the feeds to a single page.

It’s convenient to save the page and open the resulting HTML file locally on your computer. The page acts as a mediator, so you can take it anywhere. If you change the size of the browser window the media player sizes can be set to accommodate the new window size by refreshing/reloading the page.

Clicking the title of a feed opens the view to a pop-up window.

Update 20th July: New feeds have been added.
Update 18th August: Inactive feeds removed.

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