WordPress MU

I have Plugin Commander installed and I auto-activaed some plugins which I don't want users to be able to disable. Here is where the problem comes in. While they can't disable these plugins, they can access the submenu for these plugins, which appear under Settings, from which they can turn off all of the settings. In doing this, the plugins are technically disabled. It there any way to prevent that plugin submenu from showing under Settings for these users?

I looked at a plugin that can hide menus, but it can only hide the menu that normally appear in WPMU. It has no control over these plugin menus that only appear once the plugin has been enabled.

You'll have to modify each plugin to wrap its menus in a if is_site_admin() type check.

Note that your problem isn't with Plugin Commander. It is working exactly correctly. As are the plugins themselves. What you want is something beyond what either was designed to do.

Fair enough, but Plugin Commander becomes rather pointless if the user can still effectively disable the plugin. Sure, it isn't technically disabled, but with all of the features turned off, it basically would be.

Well the point of most plugins is to give the blog owner administrative control over their blog.

All plugin commander does is say whether they have the plugin or not, not control HOW they use it.

Remember, few plugins are written with MU in mind. You may have to modify them if they don't do exactly what you want.

Yes, I'm all for giving the blog owner administrative control over their blog when it does threaten the security of the site. The plugin in question, however, has to do with spam prevention and I don't want the user shutting it off, which they can do if they disable the options from the settings screen.

That should be when it doesn't threaten the security of the site.

Yep, and sometimes you need to modify plugins like I mentioned.

There's plenty of spam plugins out there for mu that can go in mu-plugins & not be disabled, and that don't have settings...

but for fine grained control, like kgraeme said, wrap an is_site_admin around it.

Andrea, would you mind sharing what some of those spam plugins are?

My preferred spam plugin is Akismet with an enterprise key hard-coded in.

quick google would've found this:
http://wpmututorials.com/how-to/stopping-spam-comments-sitewide/

:)

Thanks Andrea. I actually already found that link and Simple Trackback Validation is one of the plugins that I was already using. It, however, places the configuration screen under the Settings menu so users can access it.