WordPress MU

Ok this is my first time posting here. Forgive me if this is posted but i cannot find a answer to my question.

We are using WPMU for our college faculty pages.
Everything is running fine minus two problems.

The first problem is that file are being stored by user id. This is fine on the front end but when we get the 200+ faculty online this becomes difficult to navigate. I understand as the admin I can look at all the id's it becomes a problem and a nuisance over time.

We would prefer they blogs upload folder be by user name.
blogs.dir/users/admin etc rather than blogs.dir/users/1

We are currently using a widget that fixes this but it is really time-consuming while setting up blogs.

This is also tied to another problem with the media library upload path. It seems to create its own folder in the blogs.dir/users/(2010) rather than using the proper user folder. which would be blogs.dir/users/admin or blogs.dir/users/1

can some one please help?

I see a couple issues here.

First, the userID and where the images are uploaded is usually a moot point as the user themeselves never needs to know this.

UNLESS you are using a theme that has timthumb or custom fields for thumbnails.

OR

the htaccess rewrite rules aren't working properly.

. It seems to create its own folder in the blogs.dir/users/(2010) rather than using the proper user folder.

And this is definitely not correct. There's most likely a plugin interfering with this.

We are running a plugin that is conflicting but the conflict is due to the inability to associate the user folders with the user name rather than the user id.

We need to do this for various reasons, I have multiple admins and some of them have access to the server but not the wordpress admin so if I need some thing corrected then I must look up the user id and then give that information to them. This sound trivial but I have 150 + users which all have numbers associated with them. In a month 10 or so will leave meaning their info will be deleted throwing the numbers out of sequence, again not a problem but is slows us down drastically. I get 50 - 60 request a day to fix problems half require access to these folders. You can imagine I do not stay logged in to the admin, I am a faculty member so I stay logged into my account standard faculty account. I know each faculty members user name (first initial and last name) so I can find the folder without needing the admin account (this also goes for my server admins)

The current plugin is correcting this problem but it affect the media library and slows setting up of new blogs.

All of this is trivial to most users but to us its rather a big deal, we would like the default to be blogs.dir/users/(username) rather than blogs.dir/users/123 .

No, I'm not saying it's trivial at all.

It seems like a really convoluted workflow though.

I'm not sure how possible it would be to change the URL structure there, and if so, it would be a lot of custom work. In other words, no it's not a simple job. That's why I'm steering you in the other direction. :)

If half your requests require access to the uploads folders, then there seems like there should be some common thread here?

you could also whip up some quick code to show people their blog ID in the backend as well. Those URL are structured via the blog ID, not the user ID. Sometimes they line up, sometimes they don't.

I dont mean to be rude but I know the system we use and why. If it cant be done any other way than with a plugin then thats fine. It just seems using numbers or blog id rather than the user name seems to be good for SQL but not for users. After a year or so I might have 500 random numbers.

This might just be a pet peeve of mine but I like my servers organized. We have a very large website with multiple custom databases running on our servers so this is only a small portion of a much larger website. And we do everything by first initial last name. So it makes organizing thing easier when everything works the same.

I don't want to sound rude, which I'm sure I have this is just one of those things that seems like it could be changed.

Ok seem I have another problem, For sake of sanity I went back to the original method. I guess I have seen the light Andrea. I disabled the plugin that was changing the path. This was my only change originally, I have not tinkered with WPMU! So everything should be back to normal... well it's not.

I created a test blog to check.

If I add images via media or blog all the images go into a 2010 folder which is located in blogs.dir/users/. This happens no mater which blog is being edited.

Shouldn't it be putting all images from this blog into its own folder... for instance.
blogs.dir/users/6/2010 etc?

Yes, it definitely should be blogs.dir/users/6/2010 etc.