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

[D'Arcy Norman]

On Nov 5, 2008, at 4:37 PM, Mark Styles wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 01:06:35PM -0700, D'Arcy Norman wrote:
>> 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.
>
> We're setting up a similar service at McGill University using WPMU,  
> I'd
> be interested in hearing what plugins you're using, especially for the
> privacy level aspect.

The full list of plugins is at
http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/wp-content/plugins/

None of them are active by default, but they're available to users of  
the service.

The mu-plugins, which are enabled automatically are at
http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/wp-content/mu-plugins/

That's probably a raging security hole leaving those directories  
visible... Maybe I should block that...

The blog privacy levels are added by More Privacy Options at
http://wpmudev.org/project/More-Privacy-Options



>
>
> So far we're using the WPDirAuth plugin to handle user authentication
> via Active Directory and we're investigating a way to use AD groups  
> as a
> user access level mechanism. We'll also be providing podcast
> capabilities, feeding to iTunesU (I'm hoping someone updates  
> podpress!).

I decided to avoid integrating with the campus LDAP authentication  
because I wanted it to be clear that this was a non-institutional  
service - it's for the community, but the blogs belong to the students  
and faculty. For now, they have to create separate accounts, which  
hasn't been a problem (since the all have Facebook/MySpace/Google/ 
Twitter/etc... accounts already)

- D'Arcy