WordPress MU

moorezilla's right, with WPMU, there is no way around having students sign up at least as users without a blog. They need to be in the database (wp_user and wp_usermeta) for zillions of reasons. They are going to have a profile page to edit their own password anyway, the inconvenience of having another login/password to remember is short lived.

Have students signup as normal site users(disable "Gimme a Blog"), create the blogs for teachers in SiteAdmin-->Blogs. Teachers then go to their Dashboard and Add Users from Community one at a time using students' known email address. Once users are added they can be made any role of the teacher's blog in a couple clicks.

Teachers control who, and what capability edits/reads their blog. Couldn't take more than a few minutes for a class of 30 to be ready to go.

The big question is, how would you go about doing this if your students did not have an email address?

Thanks, Dsader. I appreciate the workaround. I'm kind of in the situation that KOBrien mentions, in that we lock down registrations by domain name, because all our teachers have email through the school, but I suppose we could do something where we gave classes a night to register, a night where we removed the domain registration limit. Have to think on this some more.

GeoffreyKOBrie,
invent a BS email domain for students and restrict registrations to that domain, and your teachers' domain.

Johnny1@mrs.green.net
Suzzie.Q@mrs.green.net

No student will ever get the email notifications, so what? Go to SiteAdmin-users to manually enter their first password.

Brilliant and evil... well brilliant any way. It must be brilliant since I never thought of it!

Thanks!

Ok, but are there any thoughts on being able to manage just these users? Maybe in a different table, or through LDAP?