I need to moderate all posts and comments for my students’ blogs. Out of the box, WPMU has a good system for taking care of comment moderation. Post moderation, while possible, is difficult to administer without a great little plugin.
To activate comment moderation you need to go to: Options –> Discussion. Under “Before a comment appears:” Check “An administrator must always approve the comment.” You can make your life easier and moderate posts via email links by checking both the “E-mail me whenever:” options. It works great–you are notified by email, through the dashboard, and the “Manage” tab that there are comments awaiting moderation.
As installed, you get no notifications of new posts. Instead one must go to the backend of each individual blog: Manage –> Posts. At the top, one must toggle status. If any are in queue for moderation, the option “Pending Review” Appears. Click the filter button and those pending review are listed. Click edit on each one to review and approve.
This is incredibly awkward and time consuming. No fewer than 8 clicks from navigating to a blog to approving a post. Initially, I couldn’t even distinguish those awaiting moderation and drafts. I honestly thought it was a bug.
Finally I found a great plugin: Peter’s Collaboration E-mails for WordPress. A new post submitted for review triggers an email with a link directly to the edit window of the post. Click the email. Click the link. Click publish. Done. No ferreting through blogs looking for new posts. It appears that most technical and administrative difficulties have been removed. At last–viable work-flow!
I’d love to discuss anyone else’s experiences using WPMU in a school setting for a technical or learning point of views. I haven’t found a place dedicated to WPMU and Education, so I set up an area on the Moodle portion of this site with a forum and a wiki dedicated to WPMU.
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Tags: blog, educational technology, student blogging, wordpress, wordpressmu, WPMU
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I’m glad you are getting good use out of the plugin! Let me know if you have any improvement suggestions or feature requests.
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Wow, you have some great information on your site about setting up WPMU. I wish I had it when I was setting up blogs for our school. Unfortunately that was in July 2007, which predates your efforts a little. It’s been a rather frustrating experience because, as you say, there is so little information out there that explains how to get it going, especially in a way that addresses the special needs of schools.
I’m doing a presentation at a technology conference in November that explains the benefits of blogging in the writing process and gives some options for setting them up. It’s at elementaryblogging.com. I’m still working on it, but I’d appreciate it if you could take a look and give me any feedback on how to improve it.
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There’s lots of good stuff there. I will draw upon it as a resource. In fact, I’ll add it to my blogroll as it supplements my information here (feel free to do the same
).I’ll examine it more closely soon and give any feedback via email.
Great to see other teachers employing open source tools!
This work by Stephen J O’Connor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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