John

I’m sorry, I can’t take this conversation off the forum, but for starters, read this.

You might find some use in this plugin, I haven’t used it myself, but it allows you to publish from one site and broadcast it to others on the same network.

Don’t be sorry, I am happy to help and am really happy that you are using WordPress and learning more about it.

Multi-site is multiple WP sites one single WP install. Essentially you have ONE multi-site, which contains the children. Sorry I didn’t catch that they were in different servers. Is that essential? Would you feel happier if you could just have one instance to manage?

I’d still recommend multi-site. You are working with one code-base of core, plugins and themes. If you set up separate installs…oh dear god I just cringe thinking of it. Especially if they only want to change colors.

You are right that it would have to be multiple sites, you can’t partition permissions within a site.
You could enable multi-site within WordPress and set up 28 separate sites for them. It is just one install, but 28 sites. Also, since the sites share the same user-table, you can grant permissions to people as necessary (Bob and be an author on site A, B, D, and L, but Jane can only author on B and R) and they would always log in with their same account.

The biggest headache you’ll run into is controlling and synchronizing plugin and theme options across all 28 sites, but if you dedicate this multi-site install to just their sites, there are methods to assist with that.

The user data is already shared between the sites, but they don’t have roles assigned to them. You can look into a plugin like this one (just an example, I haven’t used it) to set default roles and privileges across your entire network when users join.

I use a plugin called “Networks+” to have one instance of WP hosting multiple “blog networks” (essentially multi-sites). However there are some caveats to doing this.

If you are running Multi-site you have a common user database across all sites. Setting up virtual sub-networks inside of this doesn’t change it and therefore everyone with Network Admin privileges has the ability to see and modify all user accounts, even if they are not within their jurisdiction. Similarly a person with Network Admin privileges could modify plugins and themes. So I have had to set up a special Sub-Admin role to let those people manage their network but not see/modify users plugins and themes.

For my purposes, this works great. If you have only a couple of school districts you want to manage, it may not be worth the trouble and just set up 2-3 separate multisites. If you have more than just a couple, it is definitely worth it to only have one install to maintain.

Do you do centralized authentication for all of the schools or are they all separate?

There is a plugin called Networkwide Menus that can use the menu on the root blog as the primary menu on all sub-blogs.

You are very welcome, happy yoga-ing and congratulations on diving into the world of blogging!

Did you revert back to the stock WordPress theme? Twenty-Ten or Twenty-Eleven. Every plugin and theme includes functions that could be their own source of errors. Before we can blame the WP install, we have to eliminate everything else that executes functions.

I use MU and love it. But my use-case is that I need to have thousands of separate sites that are individually controlled and managed while only having to maintain one single install. It doesn’t take a lot of horsepower to run it, but if you are not self-hosting, your hosting provider may have restrictions against running MU because in a way it turns you into a solution provider (i.e. competition) and it does use more resources as you add more blogs. However a single-site install that has tons of traffic, plugins, etc… will use more than a low utilization multi-site.

My comments that MU would be hard is that for your needs it seemed like you would be better served with single-site install and just modifying page templates than to use a multi-site install and try to get the separate blogs to share content, members, themes, theme options, plugins, plugin options, blog settings, etc….

So I take it that one of the pages is your default blog post page and the other is a category archive page? I’m just trying to see which posts are ending up on which page, and why.

The shortcut answer is: Yes, it is possible to have posts limited to X on one type of page and Y on another page, but you have to edit the page templates or I suppose you could find a plugin/widget to display posts within pages and set its limit separately. This is an example, although I haven’t used it and can’t vouch for it.

Never mind, I see you have it ??

The items in the header are either going to be:
1. Coming from a custom menu, and you did indicate that “Our Solutions” is one of the menu items. What kind of item is it, page, URL,… Are the other menu components in that same menu area of the Admin page?
2. Coming from a widget and/or the link content type as indicated by Brandon.
3. Possibly in theme options…although that is an odd way to program a theme.
4. Hardcoded into the theme, which would be in wp-content/themes/<theme name>/ if you wanted to search there.