WPMU Manually Approve New Members on Local Install
We had the conversation yesterday about local installs of WPMU and the problem with activating new users since email can be difficult (impossible?) to send out from your local pc.
First, the 2 reasons for wanting a local install are:
- For local development of a site that will eventually made live
- For a company intranet. Stuff that you would not want people outside your local network to see
Will had the good idea to manually approve people, but it did take some digging thru phpmyadmin to find the right tables.
This plugin solves that by displaying all pending approvals so to manually activate an account, just click on the “approve ” link.
This is a pretty quick plugin so not too many features. Please note: once a member is approved, the thank you page shows with the user name and password the person needs to login. This will have to be manually sent to them.
The plugin shows up in your tools section under “Manual Approve”
Please let me know if you think this plugin is useful.
Plugin Download: manual-member-approve-wpmu
Related posts:
- Install WPMU on localhost with Xampp tweetmeme_url = 'http://mattkern.com/wpmu-manually-approve-new-members-on-local-install/'; I recently wanted to install WPMU...
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
[...] came across a new plugin for WPMU which I think a few of you may find very usefull: Manually approve members on local install. This was made to get around the issue of no activation emails being sent from the local [...]
It might be useful to someone, someday 
That is the thing with plugins. Who knows what the general public will find helpful in some form or another.
This will be handy indeed! It might get more exposure if you submit it as a project to http://wpmudev.org and/or the plugin repository at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins so that people can find it better! Thanks to Andrea for getting this out there and Thanks Matt for creating it!
Thanks Trent. I have made a lot of plugins (mostly personal stuff) but have never released one in the repository.
Is there any backlash from people for not doing things “properly”, like using mysql_query() instead of the wordpress API? I follow a few people on twitter that are kind of jerks about that kind of thing.
I will look into those links you sent. Thnx again….
It’s WordPress. There’s always backlash.
My concern is that all of my hosted wpmu installs use a multiple database plugin that divides up the databases. That may be an issue. I don’t know if direct db calls would function in an environment like that.
>>It’s WordPress. There’s always backlash.
haha.. true.
good point about the multiple dbs.
Well since my plugin is really only 10 lines, I probably should take the 5 minutes and write it correctly, eh?
It actually turns out to be easier to use the wpdb object for Database calls anyway. You don’t have to mess with creating or closing connections.
If you don’t want to mess with it, I can always edit the plugin to do it the “WordPress way”. That way you can avoid the community backlash.
Don’t you worry. I wouldn’t have gotten to it for a few days. It was good you just did it.
Plus, it give me a little motivation to learn the proper WP methods instead of me just hacking everything in.
Hi Matt,
I have been searching for this very capability, but I cannot get this plugin to work. Can you confirm if I am missing something in my setup?
I moved “manual-member-approve.php” to the mu-plugins folder. I set my Site Admin–>Options–>Allow new registrations…to “Only user account can be created”. I logged out as admin, then went to my signup page and entered a username and email.
I was expecting to get an email telling me a new user signed up, which I did. However, the new user didn’t go into the Manually Approve area and the new user I made also received the standard “Activate your user” email with a link. I did that and was presented with the user password.
Can you advise? Does this only work if I have a different setting for “Allow new user registrations”? (I’m trying to test, but ran out of test emails…had to delete and wait until I can re-register those emails again)
this worked perfectly for me on my 256db mu install. very very useful! I get requests all the time from people that didn’t get their activation email.
thanks for making my morning support ticket session sooo much easier
Hey Adam, Honestly I did not test it with the different sign up settings. This plug-in doesn’t affect the emails being sent, it only give a link to manually approve so the user still receives the “activate your account” email.
Not sure why the user did not show up in the manual approve area. I will try it with the different settings that you are using.
Looks like it could be very useful.