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WordPress MU and registration warning

  1. I'm setting up WPMU for a client's intranet. One of the key features they needed was the ability to create forms, for example, for running small surveys, getting feedback, etc.

    Gravity Forms is fantastic for this and the training overhead is low, which really helps.

    But we've hit something of a problem with Gravity Forms on MU.

    1) On each MU blog or site you're asked for the registration key. It should be possible to enter this once, so long as it's a developer key, I guess.
    2) If you click the uninstall Gravity Forms button on one blog, you'll deactivate the blog everywhere. That's dangerous and could cause issues, although it would seem that it doesn't actually delete forms and settings from other blogs.
    3) Even bigger issue - only a site admin can access forms on a MU blog. It would be rather more useful if admins (and maybe editors) could access forms on a MU blog - this is when the plugin has been activated as a site-wide plugin.

    Here's my installation settings for the development environment:

    PHP Version 5.2.6
    MySQL Version 5.0.67
    WordPress Version 2.9-rc-1
    Gravity Forms Version 1.3.8

    That's WPMU 2.9-rc-1 by the way!

    And just to add, I still think it's a very good plugin :-)

    Thanks,

    David.

    Posted 14 years ago on Friday January 15, 2010 | Permalink
  2. Hello David,

    Unfortunately MU is not always ideal with how it handles plugins. The things you have pointed out aren't limitations with Gravity Forms, they are limitations with WordPress itself. Most of which can be overcome by using plugins.

    1) The reason why you cannot enter your registration key once is because EVERY site within MU has it's own database tables. They don't share database tables. So Site 2 does not share the same database tables as Site 1 and therefore doesn't know the license key has been entered.

    2) Uninstalling a plugin MU uninstalls it entirely. Thats what uninstalling a plugin does in WordPress and MU and it isn't specific to Gravity Forms. It doesn't delete the form and settings from other blogs because of #1 above, they are store in different tables.

    3) By default most options within the WordPress admin are for admin only. Gravity Forms doesn't do role management, thats not what it is designed to do. You need to use a role management plugin for this.

    #2 and #3 can be solved by using the Members plugin by Justin Tadlock which adds full Role Management capabilities to WordPress. Gravity Forms is compatible with this plugin. If you use this plugin and activate it you will then be able to edit Roles and pick and choose which Gravity Forms capabilities each role has.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members/

    We plan on creating an add-on that makes using Gravity Forms on a multi-site WordPress installation easier to manage. However, WordPress MU is actually being discontinued and will be replaced by WordPress 3.0 which will enable single and multi-site WordPress installs.

    Until WordPress 3.0 is released we are not developing an add-on for the existing WordPress MU platform as it is being merged into the standard WordPress package.

    You can solve the issues

    Posted 14 years ago on Friday January 15, 2010 | Permalink
  3. OK, so it looks like the simple answer to the key setting is to create a little MU Plugin that copies the rg_gforms_key (and maybe other values) across the different wp_%_options tables.

    The others...

    Are you aware that you can have plugins selectable by blog admin, as well as sitewide? This is an important difference - if the plugin has been set to be selectable per blog then you don't want someone on one blog affecting another. Having said that, I haven't done a full and careful test on all the possible options so can't give a definitive analysis.

    I was planning on installing Justin's Roles plugin on this site, but that was further down the list. I think it's just moved up the list! I do think that by default you should allow a blog admin forms access, but as MU hasn't been a priority for you I can also understand why you haven't done so.

    Thanks for the prompt and thorough support, by the way. I'll come back with any feedback I find from the above, and will also make the mu-plugin code available to all.

    Posted 14 years ago on Saturday January 16, 2010 | Permalink
  4. Thanks! We do plan on improving our multi-user support in the future, however we are waiting for the MU merge with WordPress 3.0 to do so. No point spending time developing for WordPress MU when it won't exist in 6 months.

    Posted 14 years ago on Saturday January 16, 2010 | Permalink