In response to this thread at the WPMU forums, I’ve hacked up parts of the signup procedure to match what I wanted for my student/faculty/staff blogs here. Particularly, the goals for us were:
- Restrict registration to people with email addresses in our subdomain cae.tntech.edu — this would include every engineering graduate student plus a sizable chunk of the engineering faculty, and a few staff.
- Force blog addresses to be of the form blogs.cae.tntech.edu/username/ , where username is the individual’s designated CAE username. >99% of these match the university’s username.
- Streamline signup as much as possible. If the user has activated their CAE login account, all they should have to do is enter their username, hit the register button, check their email, and get going.
- Remove the 4-character minimum on usernames and blog names. Mostly because two of us have 3-letter usernames here.
- Restrict creating multiple blogs. One blog per user by default — if a working group or project team needs a group blog space, I’ll create it myself.
These patches for wp-signup.php and wpmu-functions.php appear to be working fine for goals 2-5. Goal 1 was already handled in WPMU by restricting the email domains that valid users can sign up from. I’ve not vetted these for blogs in subdomains instead of subdirectories, nor for security. But the changes should be small and simple enough to be easily audited.
I will take note of this information. Thanks for putting some effort to share this to us.