An alternative WordPress editor

Problem

• Registering new WordPress authors has a considerable administrative overhead.
• The access rights of WordPress authors cannot be tuned fine enough.
• As a consequence only few authors are registered each having a relatively large set of webpages to administer.

Remedy

I have created an additional mechanism for editing WordPress webpages which allows to edit webpages that are already there. This editor has the following features:

• No new WordPress author account is necessary, but the FAU Single-Sign-On is used.
• It offers a tree view of webpages that are readable/modifiable for the current user.
• It offers editing the webpage HTML content of both the German and the English version of the webpage simultaneously.

Implementation

A webserver which is secured by the FAU Single-Sign-On accesses the WordPress server of the Department of Mathematics using my own WordPress author account.

Advantages

• Some tasks of keeping webpages up-to-date can be easily delegated.
• Both searching via a tree-view and changing the German and the English webpage simultaneously are an advantage compared with the standard WordPress editor. Therefore this alternative Editor can be useful even for standard WordPress authors.

Missing features

• At the moment, the alternative editor does not allow changing the webpage tree structure. Creating new webpages, deleting them or shifting them around is possible only with the standard WordPress editor.
• Some users have reported that changes did not become immediately visible which is probably because due to some cache which is not invalidated correctly. The problem is under observation at the moment. If it should occur, please report it.