WordPress MU

We are hosting an installation of WPMU in our University for staff and students and are planning to update to 2.7 as soon as it is released

2.7 introduces a lot of new settings that can be set for each blog individually, like news feeds in Dashboard and screen options for each view. What would you recommend as the most convienent way to change the defaults of these new options for new blogs?

Mainly we would like to replace the news form the development blog with our own feed and make the default screen options as stripped down as possible.

I second that. I'm looking to do the same thing with choosing simple default screen options. Does anyone have any ideas?

Regarding your question about the feeds, you have a couple options. You can change the code in dashboard.php to reflect your own feeds. You can try this free plugin http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/simple-dashboard or this non-free plugin - http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/dashboard-feeds

Terence