I’ve got to figure out how I am going to limit the ability of students not in my classes to create new weblogs. I’m sure at some point word will get out that we now have this weblog feature…I don’t want to worry about finding inappropriate content on our site. Membership is a similar issue…I want to limit it to just the students in my class.
Ken Dow says (at ManilaNewbies): “If you want to strictly control who joins your site, your can turn off Membership to hide the Members box and disable the automated sign up. Then only you can add Members using the Admin page. Remember to bookmark the login page before you try this, or you won’t be able to log in!” Is that the only way to do it, I wonder? That would mean that the teacher would have to put in the addresses and passwords, right? And would the teacher have to create all the sites as well? Any ideas???
I think you can remove the Join Now link from the template but give the URL of the Join Now page to your students. Once they’ve joined, turn off the membership feature. I haven’t done it, but it ought to work. Check with Peter Ford and Adam Curry. They faced this question already, I think.
Good luck.
I hope someone comes out with an easy solution to your question Will. I worked some blogs this summer that we wanted restricted and I finally went for the “editors only” option..made all the kids content editors, but had to enter them individually which was a real pain. It did make me feel secure about who was getting into the blog. I tried simply removing the “join now” link but a savvy person could easily figure out how to get to the join page and go there anyway and sign up.
Going to watch here for some good ideas…I heard, from Pat a while ago, that somebody has some plug in under development for taking a comma delimited text file and getting folks in that way…how super that would be!