WordPress MU

I thought I'd share my findings for anyone going through the same problems I encountered. I want to be able to give different roles to members on each blog, and at first it wasn't quite obvious.

Firstly, if you give a member a role on the main blog (blog id "1"), that role will cascade down through the rest of the blogs. So if you make a member "administrator" of blog 1, they will be administrators on all of the blogs. If you want a member to have different roles per blog, be sure to give them "subscriber" role on blog 1 to start with.

So, lets say we want member with username "bob" to be an editor on blog 2 and a contributor on blog 3. The first thing you need to do is make sure bob has an account with "subscriber" role on blog 1. This gives him "subscriber" on all the blogs. Make note of his email address. Now log into the blog 2 wp-admin as an administrator, and ADD a new user, giving the same username (bob) and email from the existing account, but changing the role ("editor" in our case). WPMU will recognize this as an existing member, and just add the new role for the given blog (2). Be sure the username and email EXACTLY match. If the email does not match exactly, you will get a "user exists" error.

For blog 3, log into the blog 3 wp-admin as administrator, ADD a new member again, matching the user/email, and set the role ("contributor" in our case). This will add the contributor role for blog 3 to bob's account.

Hope that helps!

Firstly, if you give a member a role on the main blog (blog id "1"), that role will cascade down through the rest of the blogs.

This isn;t quite correct. The site admin role isn't listed, and if you are a Site Admin, it lists you as an administrator on blog 1 by default.

THEN you have admin access to all blogs. The only other users who have the same access after that would need to be added as Site Admins as well, under the Site Admin -> Options page.

you should be logged in across all sites whenever you login to the main domain, regardless of level.

Any user who signs up with out a blog will be attached to the main blog as a pseudo-subscriber so they have an admin area to use their profile on for things like changing their info and password. Once they have a blog, they will be assigned as the admin to their own blog, unless you've added a plugin that does different.

Site admin can add users to any blog without doing the huge amount of work you did above. Just go to Site Admin -> Blogs, edit the blog in question and on the right in the last box (I think) is a section to add users to that blog. yes, with a drop-down to pick their level.