Before joining Inmeres I had never heard of WordPress, let alone used it. But on the recommendation of Steven I decided to take the plunge and see what all of the fuss was about. What I found was that it really is a fantastic piece of kit (from the front-end aspect at least) that can be used as far more than just simple blogging software.

The Admin Area, though, is a little limited, especially with regards to limiting a particluar user’s ability to change parts of the site that you may not want them to. Although you may have a number of people that need to be of a particular user level (Administrator, Editor, Author) it should also be expected the people with each level will will have varying degrees of computer literacy. In the context of a site this means that it is best that a user only has access to parts of the admin area that they need to use. In my case I wanted to limit a user’s ability to change the Advanced Options when creating or editing posts and pages.

I scoured the web for a solution to this but the closest I could find was Mark Jaquith’s Clutter-Free plugin, but this only allowed you to limit access to the Advanced Options when creating or editing Posts, and it was the User themselves that decided on their own access.

I decided to move into uncharted territory and write my own plug-in (with a little help from Mark’s existing one). After many untold hours (ok, it was an afternoon at most) I achieved what I set out to do, and wrote my very first WordPress plug-in, and I’m rather pleased with myself.