I was getting ready to dive headfirst into learning how to do a WordPress hack that would support multiple blogs. I visited the WordPress Support Wiki and searched ‘multiple weblogs’ before I started, in case someone had come up with a straightforword solution to the problem (more on that in a bit) I am trying to solve. I found a richly informative thread with over 43 posts spanning several months. Nobody has done quite what I need done, apparently. But there is a fair amount of interest. What I did learn, though, has sent me off on another tangent.

One of the wiki authors mentioned b2evolution as a possible resource for a multiblog site instead of WordPress. Other wiki posts mentioned being discouraged by b2evo’s complexity….and so on. People say all kinds of things. I figured that after spending weeks looking into various possibilities, what could it hurt to check out one more? It seems to fit my needs - almost.

One happy coincidence is that it has many similarities to WordPress. A simple table and file structure is the chief similarity. Both apps also support the same skins/themes in some cases. The big difference is that with b2 it is really easy to create dozens of totally separate blogs that can be centrally moderated, and still give the authors varying degrees of control over the design and functionality of each site. I’ve been thinking that kids might take more of an interest in this whole process if they got to make some choices about how their site looks.

Experience tells me that this hypothesis might be totally off the mark. For one thing, it might be a complete hassle for the teacher, which is one of the reasons all kinds of cool things can’t happen in school. Another scencario I can envision is that kids will spend all of their time switching skins and spend less time actually writing. But hey! I like to play with my computer, too! It should be interesting to see if they get over it eventually. As an admin, I can deny them the option, but I’d like to interest them in technology as well as give them new opportunities and reasons to write. So the plan is to create another subdomain for northernattitude and have a go at it with the fourth graders. This blog may end up serving, in part, to document what goes on with the classroom blogs.

The one thing that I wish b2evolution or WordPress could do, and apparently can’t, is to group sets of blogs from a single installation and assign them to different admins. That way, the kids could keep their blogs running from year to year, and they’d just be passed from one teacher to another to moderate. Alternatively, I could set it up so that teachers each had blogs to moderate, and assign multiple students/authors to each blog. The difficulty with that approach is that the kids don’t get creative control over their sites, and I don’t think there is a way to keep them from being able to edit each others’ posts. The main problem is that all of the CMS and blogging tools organize information around content - not users. Classroom applications need a slightly different organizational structure. With school projects teachers are less focused on the specific topics, and more interested in the various efforts of their students. So we need to be able to sort according to groups of authors, rather than subject categories. Topically and chronologically organized information is also nice, but the people need to be sorted first. The project I was developing did this by passing the author id as a variable used in the database query. It seems like I (or someone) should be able to make that happen in b2 or WordPress, but I suspect new difficulties would develop somewhere else in the program. The other interesting difference between b2evolution and WordPress is that the skins in b2 define not only the appearance but also, to a degree, the functionality of the blog.

I’d like to have several classes in the school participate in an online writers’ workshop. But I don’t have time to help all of the teachers each learn to admin different sites. The school district webmaster is willing to give me database permissions on their server, but that may take a while for them to work out. If I am only doing this with my own group, I think I’ll just use my own hosting service and get it running ASAP.

It might even be fun.