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Private blogs? (5 posts)

  1. Shelley
    Inactive
    Posted 18 years ago #

    I want to set up individual blogs for a number of our high school students. Student blogging is a very new concept at our HS and administrators are not comfortable with student blogs being viewed by the “general public�. Is there a way to make wpmu blogs “private�, perhaps restricting viewing to registered users? I have used successfully used Registered Only on a single wp install, but with wpmu got a string of messages like the following:

    Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/easternh/public_html/wp-inst/wp-content/themes/default/header.php:5) in /home/easternh/public_html/wp-inst/wp-content/mu-plugins/registered_only.php on line 63

    I could handle having the whole wpmu install being restricted in this way, not necessarily something that is at the individual blog level.

    Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

  2. donncha
    Key Master
    Posted 18 years ago #

    You could firewall the machine off from the outside world.
    You could setup a .htaccess with deny/allow rules so that only internal IP address can view the blogs.
    A quick search on Google will show you much more about both these techniques!

  3. Farms
    Member
    Posted 18 years ago #

    Hi Shelley,

    WPMU might not be the best option for you here... a 'self-enclosed' community blogging tool like http://elgg.net could work better (saves firewalling, IP allowing etc.)

    You'll probably have to think about how you're going to use aggregation too... educational blogging without aggregation = :(

    I think that firewalling / .htaccess controlls might shag up access to RSS feeds, Elgg might have a way around that (am not sure).

    Cheers, James

  4. donncha
    Key Master
    Posted 18 years ago #

    But why would you want to make the RSS Feeds public if you want to protect the content?

  5. Farms
    Member
    Posted 18 years ago #

    Good question... probably because RSS feeds don't seme to show in search results (well, unless you;re searching Feedster :o)

    A lot of the major LMS people are thinking about this, and Moodle are actually doing it, where they offer one-way RSS to behind authentication discussion forums.

    You could even trace it to web-based archives of listservs... somehow people don't seem to care that they're posting to the web... if you can't simply post a browser to it...

    Basically a lot of K12, especially under 16, ed folks want to use blogs with their learners but find the 'writing openly on the web' thing too confronting. But locking blog away behind firewalls makes the blogging porocess virtually useless (sans aggregation) so... frreeing RSS but locking up 'web' content works well for some people.

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