WordPress MU

I posted a similar comment (http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=290&replies=11) to an old (dead) thread a month back, but felt that it wasn't in the best place in the forums. I am in the process of moving about 90 student blogs from individual wordpress blogs to wpmu. The administration of the blogs is obviously easier in wpmu. What I want to know is if it is possible to classify (categorize) blogs. That is can they be put into groups for bulk editing.

For example each student's blog would be in categories for each of their classes, then a new user (teacher) could be added to each student's blog by adding the new user to that group (category) of blogs without having to edit each blog separately. Another example would giving students a theme (or theme choices) based on grade or some other criteria (team, club, etc)

This could of course work well with commercial sites that want to have clients pay extra for added features, since there could be finer grained control of the features that individual blogs could pay for.

Along with this would be the ability to use the Role Manager plugin with wpmu to also give finer grain control of user rights. For younger students (and less technically confident users) it is good to give them a simpler administrator interface, and finer control of features. I don't always want my students to be have full admin rights even of their own blogs.

I am not a php programmer, but would be willing to try and write or edit something to get it to work with wpmu if given some hints of how to start. Of course if their is something already out there that would be even better.

I look forward to further discussion and thanks for any help.

The only way I(teacher) categorize blogs is through the blogroll. A smallish pain to synch blog registrations in the database via SiteAdmin with ever changing class lists. All students have multiple teachers therefore each blogger must categorize their posts or use multiple blogs themselves(Nobody uses multiple blogs, except staff, however).

I use trackbacks in a vital way. Trackbacks become the 2.0 "Hand your work in at the end of class." No trackback=not handed in(trackbacks can still be as frustrating as "my dog ate it, though").

Can a WPMU role manager be created to share "Editor" Site Admin functions such as moderator/pruning/editing posts/comments/ on any blog?

Interesting idea of adding blog categories in the Site Admin side of things. A table in the database alongside the "private" "public" "spam" for "teacher" and "student" or "Grade 6" is doable. Add fields to the signup form and profiles in wpmu-users.php. An "Action" column waits in SiteAdmin wpmu-blogs.php for an mu-plugin to sort by these added fields. Add a plugin for a new function(ie get_student_blog_list) to get blog lists based on these new labels (get_blog_list is in wpmu-fuctions.php).

The usertheme plugin at wpmudev.org is the only one I've seen that can be enabled/disabled on a blog by blog basis from the SiteAdmin only. Some new plugin to enable or disable a "Simple Dashboard" in place of the normal admin menus blog by blog would be cool.

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=3026&replies=9
Why not a "primary-plugins" "mid-plugins" "senior-plugins" based on the roles defined at sign-up? For that matter, dividing up the themes into role-based folders shouldn't be impossible either. Comvatars lets users customize their avatar after x number of posts on a users blog. Could be tied to site-wide role as well.

I'm interested in the simple menus especially.

Right now I am only using the blogs with single classes so I just made a teachers page with classes and links to each student in each class, but I see where using the blogroll would be a better solution with students with many classes. But that still means that the urls of each blog have to be entered at some point. I'll try that solution until I can get really simple administration so that we can focus on making it easy and fun for everyone, especially the non-technical users.

I've never used trackback, just comments. Who initiates the trackback? Do the students leave a trackback comment on the teacher's assignment page?

Right now the Role Manager plugin doesn't work with wpmu. I've been using it with regular WP because I could give some students rights, for example, change themes and others could even edit themes. It also allows the creation of new users types so that it can be fairly fine grained about what each type of user can do. It would be great if this could be used from the siteadmin to change user rights sitewide, and then to be able to edit a block of blogs and change the users from say "admin" to "editor".

I found a great plugin that lets one customize the menu (http://barunsingh.com/software/custom-admin-menu/), so if this could be used to bulk edit a group of blogs functions could be hidden and menus renamed or moved to suit each group of students.

Yes, if something like the plugin above could be run from the main site only (as discussed in the link: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=3026&replies=9) but be applied to all blogs in the site, then it would be really easy to customize individual, or groups of blogs. I'll read that more carefully later.

As a further aside (idea) I have been thinking about using blogs as journals and using the "category visibility" plugin to hide the "journal" category to keep it private. Using this plugin (http://ryowebsite.com/?p=46) it is possible to have only logged in users above a certain level able to view that hidden category.

Wow, lots of ideas to think about and investigate.