Review: Allow Categories WordPress Plugin

I was using, was mind you, using the Allow Categories WordPress plugin to limit access to a few categories which I wanted to make “user only”.  For that purpose it worked great.

The plugin gives a page, rather poorly laid out if you ask me, but a page nonetheless that allows you to select at the user and category level who has access to what categories.  Why “poorly”?  Imagine a grid with categories along the top, users down the side, and checkboxes at the intersections and you’ll have exactly how that page was laid out.  Now, this isn’t a bad thing if you don’t have that many categories, but do have lots of users.  But if you have lots of categories, then it’ll wind up with you scrolling horizontally — and that is never a good idea for a web page.

But, that’s just a design issue… and all of us web designers are different, and have different ideas of what is the “right” way to do something.

The reason that I’ve uninstalled this plugin (and temporarily moved all the posts I’m hiding to “draft” status until I can figure out a better solution) is that every time I added a new category, I’d forget that I had to go down to a different section of the admin interface and enable the admin user (me) to have access to that new category.  I’m sorry, but shouldn’t the admin have access to every category on the blog they’re administering?  Oh, and shouldn’t something that adds access permissions to a category enhance or extend the Categories page?  Or at the very least, stick it’s config page in the Posts section?  Hmmm?  Ya think?

So… I’m back to the drawing board, wondering why I had switched from Joomla — which actually has user access levels built-in — to WordPress.  Oh yeah… Joomla sucks as a blogging tool… but that’ll have to wait for another review.