School & class blogs: Categorize with categories or custom posts?

I don’t really like the idea of creating custom posts for blog purpose as the “posts” are historically for blogging.

What about create a multisite install and put the school blog and classes blogs as separate sites (with subdomains). They can share the same theme (or not) and would have separate access. Also, they would only have access to what they need (so you wouldn’t have to bother about what each user can or can’t do on the main site).

I essentially need to connect teachers, parents & students under the same hood

Do you have an idea of the density of content you expect? And do you think it would be something like :

• School Blog (general posts from the school)

• Class 1
• Class 2
• Class 3
• Teachers

or

• School Blog

• Category
• Category
• Category

• Class 1 Blog

• Category
• Category
• Category

By the way, do you have a link to that site so it can give an idea of the scope.

The school will have basically:
– Ordinary posts | category: news, articles, featured content | authors: teachers and staff

– School blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: teachers

– class “year 1” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: teachers

– class “year 2” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: teachers

– class “year 3” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: teachers

– class “year 4” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: teachers

– class “year 5” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: teachers

– class “year 6” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: teachers

– class “year 7” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: class alumns

– class “year 8” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: class alumns

– class “year 9” blog | category: (to be determined, but could have no category) | authors: class alumns

In the end, we could simply use category school-blog & year 1 yo year 7 ** or ** custom post types school and year 1 to 7

The site under development is here: https://goo.gl/RnxBQ1

Pros & cons?

Hi,

I think if you keep your content well organized, this can work with posts only. You have to consider what kind of archive pages you need. Per example, do you want to be able to have an archive that shows all the recent posts from all classes?

For Pros & Cons, I would like to see other opinions on this matter, but for me, I tend to keep blogging into posts as it’s native to WordPress. I would create custom post types for content that does not need to be archived in the same way (by date, author, …).

So if your blog posts are organized with a parent category (to group them), then you would have a main blog, and with the category archives you would be able to have pages that shows only blog posts from class x. It will also keep your other existing categories apart from the rest.

I would try something like this :

– News
– Articles
– Featured Content
– School Blog (the parent category would be for general posts)
— Class Year 1
— Class Year 2

And if you need to have other categories under your school blog :

– News
– Article
– Featured Content
– School Blog
— Category 1
— Category 2
— Classes
— Class Year 1
— Class Year 2

You may need to use a plugin to manage which users can post in which categories.

I hope that someone else can share ideas about this. For sure you’ll have to test what works best for your needs.

Mate this is exactly what I was looking for!
Essentially I will have to find a way to disallow students to post everywhere but their category.

Firstly I thought I could disable & customize dashboard access for students in a way they will only be allowed to view posts, possibly only in the allowed category. To achieve this I have created custom roles (students, parents & teachers) + customized usermeta adding custom fields for students (class field) so each student will be assigned to a class. To make things easier I thought it could be handful to use frontend wordpress for students posting (although it is not a very flexible solution). What do you think?

BTW, are you aware of a plugin that may enforce category per user?

Hi,

I just searched the WordPress Plugin Directory and found some plugins that could do the trick (search for plugins about role and permissions – or restrict author posting), but did not try any myself. So what I would do in that case is try them and see if they work for my needs.

For one client we use a plugin called press permit core with the additional collaborative editing module.

It allows you to create new types of user other than say editor and apply filters to what those types of use can edit.

We use it exactly as you describe we have users setup to only be able to add and edit content if that content is part of a specific category.

It takes a bit of configuration but shouldn’t be too bad to get the hang of.

@latro, I absolutely need a supported and reliable tool. Does the plugin meets this requirements?