I've spent the past night cleaning up the backend and doing some serious organization there to try and make it less like my messy desk and more like a nice clean workshop. 

Of course, not everyone will see this. The average site user becomes a "subscriber" when they sign up and is able to edit their profile, add books to their collection, etc. 

But I've promoted people who have been very generous about putting time and effort into the site – not a big deal, but it's direct access to the backend. These users can submit books to the database, write blog posts/reviews directly, and then just submit for review through there. 

Those users have "Contributor" status and you can see it on the forum with their shiny new badges. They're probably also the only guys who will read and respond to this thread. 

Simon, Chris, Marc, and Brian.

There are a couple more people who are probably deserving of this (and who I'd like to get into it, Sam/Lonefeather? Daniel and Alex if they ever have the free time to come by again.) but don't have the status technically set yet. Let me know if any of you mentioned want in and I'll set you up.

Brian, your name doesn't have a contributor tag yet because I set it by post count for Chris and Simon, but had to set a custom title for Marc to get it up (don't know if he cares about the changing titles as much. I think they're fun.) If you want, I can set you a couple title and get yours going.

So, the immediate effect is that you can work on your reviews right in the backend, save drafts, etc.

Don't worry about the ones you sent me already, I'll get those ones up. But if you want to work on new ones, let me know.

It's probably still a good idea to chat with me before submitting books, but you also have the capability to do that. Feel free to play with it, you can't actually break anything, though I'd rather not have to delete 20 pages of drafts – so try and keep your experimenting to one or two "test" posts. 

Hope you dig it, guys. I'm excited, as always. You've all been a big help, so I wanted to help you feel more officially part of the whole shebang. 

Just follow your nose!

er, when you click on profile you should see some more options on the top menu now. 

you can't. ;)

Technically all "reading order" placement is handled by the date function. I just use it as a numerical string that wordpress likes to keep things in order by (it makes setting queries easier since I don't have to deal with metadata if I'm just going by RRO). 

So if you can see the date on those previous books, you'd be able to see what to set the date as on your new post. 

But really, I think I'll keep handling the placements for now – it won't matter for self contained books since their placement is handled by the sort-title and end-date (for alphabetical and chronological) but I want to keep the main lists synced to my offline database, so I have to figure that manually. 

Simon said:

I'm thinking I will just post all reviews and anything blog wise (if I ever feel the need to blog that is) through you. I wouldn't be comfortable with posting front page stuff without the okay from the 'Boss'. 

I was also thinking about an review of the title linked in below as I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was also weighing up the possibility of writing an essay based on the book instead, and leave the review to someone else (maybe a non-physicist reviewing it from their viewpoint):

http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Superheroes-Spectacular-Second/dp/1592405088/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298991776&sr=1-1

With this system, you don't have to worry about anything you create getting out there without me having a look at it. Basically, I just edit it at the site instead of downloading it from email and pasting it in. So you can play around with creating almost anything, features, news posts, new database entries, reviews, and it will sit in "pending" until I approve it. 

I'm gonna find a snippit of code that emails me whenever there's a new pending post, so I remember to stay on top of it (cause there aren't notifications by default.)

Well, I tried a plugin to let you guys edit existing posts under moderation, but while it seems to work great for the post content, it doesn't work at all for custom fields and taxonomies (which is all we really need to work on.) 

I contacted the plugin author to see if there's a fix or if he's patching in the near future, but I'll keep looking.