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1 Jan 10, 2007 19:34    

Hi,
I've been looking at all the various blogging systems out there (wordpress, livetype, etc.) and understand the b2evolution allows for multiple bloggers. I'd like to set up the site for our school district and want to be able to do the following:

1)Have main categories of high school, middle school and elementary school with sub categories of school names and further sub categories of classrooms below the schools.

2)Each teacher will only be able to have a blog under their school name and will only be able to post to their blog. I'd like them to be able to create sub categories within their blog that only they will be able to post to. I don't want the teachers to post outside of their blog categories.

3)Each blog can have it's own template/theme.

I have no problem creating the blogs for them initially because I think it will be a slow process of getting teachers used to blogging. If b2evolution can do this I'd be a very happy camper indeed!

Thanks for your time.
Lsabug

2 Jan 21, 2007 02:40

lsabug wrote:

1)Have main categories of high school, middle school and elementary school with sub categories of school names and further sub categories of classrooms below the schools.

This is very possible of course, but to then limit permissions to a blogger based on a category or sub-category is currently not possible. Your goal is very possible, but not in the fashion you've laid out here. I'll explain.

lsabug wrote:

2)Each teacher will only be able to have a blog under their school name and will only be able to post to their blog. I'd like them to be able to create sub categories within their blog that only they will be able to post to. I don't want the teachers to post outside of their blog categories.

This is completely within scope.

lsabug wrote:

3)Each blog can have it's own template/theme.

This too is completely within scope.

Okay so let's make some progress, if you're still interested in trying this. It seems to me what you want is to have a navigation feature that looks like this:

    HIGH SCHOOLS
    • HS AAA

      • teacher A

      • teacher B[/list:u]

      • HS BBB

        • teacher C

        • teacher D

        • teacher E (I never liked teacher E ...)[/list:u][/list:u][/list:u]

        • I am using "teacher" and "classroom" interchangeably, which may or may not be right, but I'm trying to reach a workable solution so bear with me. You want each teacher to "own" their own blog, but the problem is that you are nesting a high-level feature (a blog) inside a lowerer order feature (categories). We can resolve this, but it takes a bit of trickery on your part. Nothing that requires complex hacking that will hinder upgradeability, but far enough outside the norm that I believe it is not documented well. So here is what I would do: multiple installations in one database AND require teachers to begin their blog the name of their school. Each installation can specify the table name prefix in it's configuration, so use that feature and have the root installation use the default "evo_" prefix. In that installation you give some generic posts welcoming people to your blog and giving teachers a heads-up on how to get in. You edit your default installation skin to provide a bloglist of each of the secondary installations you'll make. You then make secondary installations using the prefix "evo_HS_" for high schools, and so on and so forth for middle and primary schools. In these "secondary installations" is where each teacher will have their own blog. There is a hack that allows one to list blogs alphabetically instead of in creation (numerical) order. You would want that so that teachers are listed, within each level of schooling, by school name and teacher (class?) name. It's not an official part of b2evolution, but in b2evolution your skin is the place to make changes to how the whole thing looks for visitors. Anyway it's doable. You would end up with a similar tree - at the main installlation's main page, but each 'teacher name' link would actually pull data from a different database. So like the main installation is at 'schoolstuff.tld' and HS teachers blog at 'schoolstuff/hs/' and so on and so forth. PM me if you want some help getting this going.


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