[wp-edu] Wordpress vs Wordpress MU for a school website?

[D'Arcy Norman]

On Nov 5, 2008, at 12:25 PM, Velda wrote:

> Hi all, or whoever might be signed up so far at least....  Is anyone  
> else in here using WordPress for an elementary school website?
> I need to get my kids' school site off Joomla, and I'm debating  
> whether I need to go with WordPress MU so different departments can  
> manage their own stuff.  I'd definitely envisioned using multiple  
> blogs with sub categories to achieve different content management  
> functions.  The 'hundreds of thousands' of blogs bit sounds like MU  
> would be overkill... as we need no more than 10 here.  But I'm  
> curious as to how that works.
>
> If anyone's got this going for their school, would you mind sharing  
> your url and your experience?
>
> I'm still somewhat new to WordPress, so pardon my ignorance... I'm  
> hoping I'll catch up quickly :o)  Thank you, and thanks to  
> automattic for making this list, too.

I don't have any examples of WordPress for elementary schools, but  
don't let the "hundreds of thousands" part of WPMU scare you off. It's  
really "more than 1, and up to hundreds of thousands." WPMU is really  
just WordPress with a few more options to configure and stuff to  
monitor, but it really can make managing multiple sites simple. Or, at  
least, simpler than managing a bunch of separate standalone sites...

The service I run for the University of Calgary now has a few blogs  
running on it, with everything from student's personal blogs to full  
courses being run in it. Also, we can configure the privacy levels for  
each blog, ranging from fully open to viewable by members only.



- D'Arcy Norman
      Educational Technology Developer
      Teaching & Learning Centre, The University of Calgary
      dlnorman at ucalgary.ca
      http://tlc.ucalgary.ca
      http://www.darcynorman.net
      (403) 220-2504