WordPress MU

I'm brand new to WPMU, setting up a site to host blogs for teachers at a single school. I've searched around, but haven't found anything to this effect: is it possible to some way provide a categorized index of all the blogs on my front page?

In other words, when users (students and parents) hit the main page, I'd like them to see links to blogs grouped by subject: English Department, Math Department, etc. I imagines this would involve some custom(?) category field for each blog, to make them sortable...

Since the total number of blogs will ultimately be limited, there's no reason I couldn't manually link up the blogs to the front page, but it would be so much cooler if it were automated. ;)

Anybody have any suggestions where/how to start? Or is such a thing even possible?

Only thing I can think of is manual. Even if it were automated, you would still have to categorize the blogs themselves.

You may want to do a search for sitewide tags here in the forums. That may work for you.

Regards,
-drmike

MU has a function built right in to list all the blogs. Can't remember the name right off the top of my head though.

I used Andrew's plugin myself:

list_all_wpmu_blogs

http://www.wpmudev.org/project/list-all

I don't think that';s what teh poster is asking about though. It does come up from time to time in wp.com land. A master list of blogs sorted by categories.

This is an interesting idea... But seems like it would surely be an add-on/plugin... It sounds like JMF is asking for "list-all-blogs" but then sorted by blog-tags. So sort of like a blend betweeen site-tags and list-all-blogs. Seems like to accomplish this one would add a blog meta-data field that allowed the blog owner to tag their blog (not their posts) with categories (kind of like how links are tagged).

Hmmm.... cool idea.

I asked about the same idea a while back for the same purpose. The first was a dead thread. I'm really interested in the idea, but anytime I have to work with wpmu has been used in trying to get things set up as a teacher (mysql 3.** won't work with wpmu, but the homepage is proprietary and won't work with 4.*, but that is another story). Here is the link to that thread. dsader had a hint about how this might be approached. Let me know how things go.

href=http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=3077&replies=3#post-18517

"mysql 3.** won't work with wpmu..."

I disagree, for now. Not too far in the future that would be a correct statement though.

Hi guys! Forgot to post back -- I went with drmike's 'manual' suggestion. You can see the result here: http://www.rchsteachers.org

That's probably a bit tricky to auto-generate, I'm guessing, and since I'm pressed for time, I'm not going to worry about it any more. ;)

Thanks!
Jeff.

Hi, I'm working on a similar project. To solve the blogs-categories problem I've programmed a external app with cake-php framework. From there, I manage the categories. The idea is that a user (a student) chooses his state>city>school>grade (region>ciudad>liceo>curso, in Chile) and register on that category. Once registered, the user can create (or join) the courses (asignaturas) blogs on only that category.

The blog creation is 'manual', external to wpmu create_blog function, so it's probably unsafe in some cases, but it's working. To avoid some problems, users join only as 'authors'.

Maybe it wold be a cool idea digg depper into this, and create something more stable to categorizate blogs on wpmu.

Greetings,
Jaime

That would be pretty cool for a an aggregation page (or set of pages, even) -- In my case, I'm dealing with a finite number of faculty.

But something for students...how cool would it be to have automatic signups enabled (even, say, limited to school-assigned email addresses)...and have new blogs automatically categorized as 9th Grade, 10th Grade, or by teacher, class, etc.

Moving or migrating them later could just involve changing a category, like from 9th to 10th grade, and bam, they're switched on the index pages as well...

Wow. Could have interesting implications for online writing portfolios that move from grade to grade with a student, etc...

Unfortunately, WAY over my head programming-wise, but there may be possibilities there, yes?

This is exactly what I am looking for.
I would like to

1. Have a new blog created for every new member
2. Each blog only have x number of categories (users cannot add/edit categories)
3. Each blog starts with another default category besides Uncategorized
4. Create an 'Archive' List such as the one in plain vanilla Wordpress with all the categories and blog posts from across the WPMU installation like a list_all_wpmu_blogs on steroids; e.g. Cat1 (49 Posts in 5 Blogs), Cat2 (65 Posts in 13 Blogs)...

Is there a way to do this in WPMU?