As an alternative to enabling the theme editor in the WordPress MU, I came across a MU Plugin named RDG Custom Style Sheet. The plugin gives the user access to change the style.php sheet only within the Admin Dashboard.
Here are the plugin’s features:
- Adds an editor to the Design Menu of the WordPress admin area. This is basically a redesigned Theme Editor that you will find in a standard WordPress installation, though it only allows Stylesheets to be edited and only Stylesheets that are located in the Blogs Upload directory.
- Allows users to Preview their Stylesheet changes before saving them, allowing them to make changes without visitors to their blog seeing the changes until they are saved.
- Creates a blank style sheet with usage instructions for the current Theme when the editor is opened. If the user changes themes, it will create a new stylesheet for that them. This allows users to maintain different stylesheets for different themes (if they change their theme).
- Creates a login.css stylesheet that is used to customize the blogs login.php screen.
- Will automatically use a ’sitewide’ login stylesheet if the user has not designed one for their own individual blog (if one exists)
- Can easily be coded to be enabled only if a user has ‘paid’ for a custom stylesheet option. By default, on my MU site, users must pay for the feature. I use the premium upgrades plugin available at http://premium.wpmudev.org. If you are not running this plugin, the plugin will always insert the custom stylesheets if they exist.
There are still many security concerns with a plugin like this, however it does limit the access to the theme files and provides access to what most users want to modify.
You can find the plugin here.