New Plugin: Bulk User Management

Josh Betz is an Intern Code Wrangler with Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP program this summer before he heads back to the University of Wisconsin to complete his degree in Computer Science. He enjoys running, hacking on WordPress, and the beautiful view from the terrace at UW’s Memorial Union.

Bulk User Management is a plugin that we’ve built to solve the problem of having to access to each site in your network to manage users. It is be especially useful for customers with large blog networks or anyone that might want to add multiple users to multiple sites from a single dashboard.

Bulk User Management allows a set of specified users to manage permissions across all your sites. Users from every site in your network are displayed in a list and can be added to or removed from any of your sites. Any users that aren’t currently in your network can still be invited to any of your blogs through the normal invite process. After they accept, they can be managed in bulk across the network.

To enable the plugin, you will need to pass an array of user logins to wpcom_vip_bulk_user_management_whitelist(). Bulk User Management will only be available for these users and they will be able to manage all the users in your network regardless of their specified capability on those sites.

wpcom_vip_bulk_user_management_whitelist( array( 'user1', 'user2', 'user3' ) );

To manage users, use the checkboxes to select which users to manage and pick an action from the “Bulk Actions” dropdown. This will reveal a bulk edit section in the table. Select the sites that the changes should apply to and pick a role if necessary. Clicking update will apply the changes and refresh the page.

The following are some screenshots showing step-by-step how the bulk editing flow works.