Integrating multi-site blogs in parent site

Hi,

The site I’m working on is for a school. It’s got a main site of largely static pages, but each school class has a blog which should be updated every week or so by the teacher.

To get this working I installed multi site and set up each blog as a sub-site, separate from the main site. However I’m a bit stuck as to how best to integrate the two back again.

The site has a custom theme. To get this working I created a new index.php which reads have_posts and that seems to work fine.

However my left sidebar uses wp_list_pages. This presents two problems: first, in my blog sub-sites it displays the pages from the sub-site rather than the main site. Is there any way I can make it read the page list from another site/address?

The second issue is that “class blogs” is a header page in the main site. On that page there should be a list of the blogs, and in the menu it should have children corresponding to the sub-sites.

I presume this can’t be managed automatically in the sense that wp_list_pages can magically be made to include blogs from sub-sites as child items. But I don’t know how best to manage it. Do I need to create a page in the main site to host each blog? If so, how do I modify index.php for my theme to detect that it needs to load a blog and load the appropriate content? Or is there a better way?

Cheers,
Matt