Exploring Default Site Settings

Default settings can control user access to various such things as menus, themes, and the Dashboard. The next few sections discuss these settings in detail.

Private blogs

The Site Visibility setting on the Privacy Settings page in the regular Dashboard (as well as your users' Dashboard) controls the privacy of that particular site. However, just because you set the main site (the Network Admin's site) to private, does not mean that every site in your network is private — each user must toggle her own privacy settings on the Privacy page in her Dashboard. To access the Privacy Settings page, choose SettingsPrivacy, as shown in Figure 4-8.

By default, sites are visible to everyone, including search engines and other bots. By selecting the second option, search engines and bots cannot crawl the site at all. Additionally, if you use plugins to create a visible list of network sites — any sites that are marked private will not display in such public lists. Individual plugins should be tested to verify that they observe the privacy setting.

Figure 4-8: Default privacy settings.

Enabling plugins

Because users cannot add or edit plugins, the Plugins menu is disabled by default. The Network Admin can still access the Plugins page via the Network Admin Dashboard Plugins menu link — but other administrators cannot.

To enable the Plugins menu for site administrators, follow these steps:

1. Choose Network AdminSettings.
2. Scroll to the Menu settings section.

   The check box for the Plugins menu is empty, designating that users will not see the menu regardless of their user role.

3. Check the box to make the Plugins menu available to site administrators, as shown in Figure 4-9.

   Figure 4-9: Enabling the Plugins menu for site administrators.

   

4. Save your selection by clicking the Save Changes button, as shown in Figure 4-9.