BuddyPress.org

It’s not any one plugin that does the job. Here’s how I do it.

Create a new blog (let’s call it Test) and set the privacy (more privacy options needed here and bp-mpo-activity-filter to keep it’s content out of the stream) to “only blog admins can see this blog” (this is necessary, but keeps things clean since nothing should get added to this blog).

Use new-blog-defaults to set the blog defaults including menus that the users cannot use.

Members is used to set capabilities of the admin (I don’t change the role of the new blog just the admin’s capabilities) so the admin is “like” an editor or author, but I can still let them change their themes (theme changing is very important to young users).

Wpmu-plugin-manager lets you set which plugins to allow users to use and which ones are automatically turned on (I always turn on Ozh’s Admin Menus for example). Turn on any plugins you want to use and tweek their settings and any other blog settings.

Then Adminimize to further hide menus the users don’t need (it only hides menus, but most users will never find them anyway). Adminimize is great for simplifying the write panels for posts and pages too. Any plugins I don’t want users to change settings on I can make sure they don’t have access to by making sure the menus are hidden.

Now use new-blog-options under the site admin menu and give it the blog id of Test and check off any of the database fields you want new blogs to have (make sure the Members and Adminimize ones are checked). Maybe this isn’t exactly what you want, but it is probably the best overall way to simplify blogs for younger users.

Also since I use these with classes, I just import my whole list from a spreadsheet using DD Import Users as subscribers on the main blog. I use limit-blogs-per-user and set the site-admin/options to 2. Now users can create their own blog, but can only create one blog of their own. This saves me a lot of time, but still gives the users a fair amount of freedom with their blogs.

It isn’t a perfect solution. I would like to see some of the overlapping capabilities put into one plugin for cloning blogs. I would especially like to see the ability to have different templates (ie base blogs to clone from) so that I could have one setup for say grade 1 students and another setup for grade 5 students.

Hope this is useful to someone.