Wiki progress despite confusion setting up WetPaint administration

We decided to go with WetPaint for the trial run and three of us (E., D., and S.) met last week to work together to go through the initial set up together. Our requirements are that the web site must be private (not viewable by anyone other than those we authorize), and that anyone authorized can use the site (add pages, edit pages, and post comments in the discussion forums). Preferably, all of us who want to use the site would only need to know a single login name and password. The first two requirements were easily met, but the third caused a problem.

WetPaint's user interface is straightforward but even so, you must associate a user account with an email address. We didn't have a common email address available, and we didn't want to tie it to something like an "info@" or "webmaster@" address, so that meant the single logon user account we wanted to use would have to be tied to a specific individual's email address. We also wanted the single user account to have full administrative privileges. We used E's work email address for the main account.

After we created the account and starting page (a process needing a mere two or three clicks) WetPaint then asked us to invite others to join the page. By inviting others to join, it made them members. Members can be assigned editing privileges. This conflicted with our initial requirement of using just a single user account and login. We soon realized, though, it would be a "good thing" to have each librarian be a member, and sign in under their own account, so that whenever they edited pages or posted comments, we would know who said or did what.

So we sent invitations to join to the work email addresses of the other two librarians (D and S). That's when WetPaint did something odd. We were working on D's computer, and when D accepted the invitation to join, because we were already logged into WetPaint on D's computer, WetPaint changed the email address associated with the main account to D's email address instead of E's! Odd, confusing, and totally unexpected.

When we sent the invitation to join to D and S, we had only given them "authoring" permissions, not site adminstration permissions. We wanted to change this and made the mistake of having D "leave" the site -- meaning, no longer be a member. We clicked one button and voila, D was no longer associated with the site -- but then we realized WetPaint just allowed us to do something bad: we deleted the only account which had been given administrative privileges to the site!

After a few minutes of discussion (and searching WetPaint Help) we quickly decided to abandon the first site and start fresh. Lesson learned? We should have more fully investigated WetPaint's site creation features, workflow and requirements before diving into creating our site. What is disconcerting to me is that WetPaint's interface appears so easy-to-use and clear, that I felt lulled into a false sense of mastery. I just assumed WetPaint would guide us appropriately and especially not let us make the kind of mistake we made in removing the only account which had been given site administrator privileges!

Next time, more about project progress.