Managing Your WordPress Network Settings

By Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Cory Miller, Kevin Palmer, Andrea Rennick, and Michael Torbert from WordPress All-in-One For Dummies

WordPress’s Network Admin Dashboard has its own set of menus separate from the regular Site Admin Dashboard. Those menus provide all the tools you need to manage your WordPress network. All the items in the Network Admin Dashboard are important, and you will use them frequently throughout the life of your network.

Performing some preliminary configurations on your network before you do anything else is important. Therefore, the following discussion covers the Settings menu.

The Settings page contains several sections of options for you to configure to set up your network the way you want to.

Operational settings

The operational settings are Network Name and Network Admin Email:

Network Name: This name is included in all communications regarding your network, including e-mails that new users receive when they register.
Network Admin Email: Correspondence from your website, including all registration and sign-up e-mails that new users receive use this address.

Registration settings

The Registration Settings section let you control aspects of the users sign up process.

From one of the following options, decide how you want registrations to be handled on your network:

Registration is Disabled: When selected, this option prevents people who visit your site from registering for a user account.
User Accounts May Be Registered: Gives people the ability to create only a user account; users will not be able to create a blog within your network.
Logged In Users May Register New Sites: Allows only existing users to create a new blog within your network, which disables new user registration completely.
Both Sites and User Accounts Can Be Registered: Gives users the ability to register an account and a site on your network during the registration process.

The remaining options under the Registration Settings heading are as follows:

Registration Notification: When this option is checked, an e-mail is sent to the network admin every time a user or a site is created on the system.
Add New Users: Choose Yes or No to show whether you want to allow your community blog owners to add new users to their own community blog via the Users page.
Banned Names: By default, WordPress bans several usernames from being registered within your community, including www, web, root, admin, main, invite, administrator, and so on.
Limited Email Registrations: You can limit sign-ups based on e-mail.
Banned Email Domains: This feature blocks all sign-ups from a particular domain.

New site settings

The New Site Settings section is a configurable list of items that populates default values when a new site is created.

Welcome Email: The e-mail text that owners of newly registered sites in your network receive when their registration is complete. There is a default message that you can leave in place, or you can type the e-mail text.
These variables aren’t explained on the Site Options page:
- SITE_NAME: Inserts the name of your WordPress site.
- BLOG_URL: Inserts the URL of the new member’s blog.
- USERNAME: Inserts the new member’s username.
- PASSWORD: Inserts the new member’s password.
- BLOG_URLwp-login.php: Inserts the hyperlinked login URL for the new member’s blog.
- SITE_URL: Inserts the hyperlinked URL for your WordPress site.
First Post: This is the first post that displays on every newly created site in your network. WordPress provides you with some default text that you can leave in place, or you can use this area to provide useful information about your site and services.
- First Page: This default text displays on every newly created site in your network.
- First Comment: This comment displays on the first post on every newly created site within your network.
- First Comment Author: Type the name of the author of the first comment on new sites in your network.
- First Comment URL: Type the web address (URL) for the author of the first comment.

Upload settings

The Upload Settings section defines global values pertaining to the type of files you will allow the site owners within your network to upload using the file upload feature on the WordPress Write Posts and Write Page areas.

Enabling file types displays the upload icons above the post box on the Write Page and Write Post pages in the users Dashboard. In some situations, you may decide to disallow certain file types.

The Site Upload space defines the default storage space you give users to store the files they upload to their blogs.

The Upload File Types text field defines the types of files that you will allow site owners to upload to their sites in their Dashboard.

The final option under Upload Settings defines the Max Upload file size. This amount is in kilobytes (K), and the default file size is 1500K.

Menu settings

The Plugins menu is disabled within the Dashboard of all network sites (except for the network admin’s). However, the network admin always has access to the Plugins menu. If you leave this option unselected, the Plugins page will be visible to users on their own site dashboard. Place a check mark in the box to enable the Plugins menu for your network users.