BuddyPress.org

OK… Finally got it all working:

In the file: /mu-plugins/bp-blogs/bp-blogs-classes.php

Change wb.public =1 > wb.public = -1

Change b.public =1 > b.public = -1

The first change does the Blog Listing Page. The second handles the Sidebar Recent Posts Widget.

Thanks to Jalien and Burtadsit for their help.

– A bit about my project –

I work for a K-12 District in Dearborn, Michigan with about 18,000 K-12 Students. We have a state mandate that students graduate with a minimum of 20 hours of online structured experiences. (We all know that students do way more than this, but now we have to report on it). I am creating a online social networking site so that students can create blogs for each of their classes, form groups for student counsel and other clubs, and all the benefits of being able to create student portfolios. This BP+WPMU system also has many other benefits for things where the teacher may have a special project where the students need to create a website… well now they can do that!

It was also imperative that this be a “Walled Garden” because we did not want outsiders to have access to students. I do have the ability to individually make blogs public for select projects as requested by a teacher. Also, it is all based on LDAP logins so students at anytime can login with their District ID and Password and create a blog or join a group eliminating me from needing to manage so many students and verifying that they are indeed students.

We also have Moodle, so a last minute suggestion would be to somehow let BP+WPMU and Moodle share logins and files as a eLearning portfolio system. We were piloting Mahara.org software which does this, but I got feedback from students and teachers who were unhappy with the navigation and way the software functioned. They were hoping for something more intuitive and easier to use with less steps. Not to take away from that project because I understood how to use it, but I think they will like the BP-WPMU better because we already have 700+ teachers blogging on another WPMU system, so they know the admin panels already.

I had to make the whole site private using this plugin:

http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/sitewide-privacy-options-for-wordpress-mu

There is a free version of this plugin, but we wanted to be able to override the settings by site admin only.

You cannot access any page on the site without logging in first. This works for us since we don’t want outside access to students. On rare occasions where the teacher wants the students to blog publicly, I can override the setting for the specific blogs.

Nope. Nothing other than what was descirbed above so that the plugins would override the privacy settings and work.

What state or school? I’d be interested in feedback on how the students are using it or is it for staff?