A huge win for the educational market is the ability to manage comments in a comprehensive way, with a filter or by allowing a site manager to queue all comments for approval. Plus it has the ability to password protect individual pages.
I get really frustrated sometimes by a) my inability (time and skills) to play around with other blogging software packages and b) by how close Manila comes to being the no-brainer choice for education. Problem is, until it builds in some of the functionality Bryan refers to above, it won’t. I know UserLand isn’t in this just for the education market (however big or small that may be,) but whatever educators finally end up adopting HAS TO HAVE the security and preview functionality to appease an ever more skittish group of administrators and parents (at least at my school, which I’m starting to think is leading the way in that department.)
Problem (?) is I feel like I’m pretty much married to Manila for at least the next couple of years…
Switched from Manila to Movable Type about 18 months ago (cost)
was unhappy with the “lost” features.
Switched to WordPress 1 month ago
Happy to be portable
Happy with *much* better performance
oh, yes, basically felt orphaned on the Mac platform
Hi Will, if you wanna play around with WordPress (which, just as soon as it gets the ‘multiple blogs from one database’ thing sorted – an apparently it’s on the way – will be IMO a big lotta competition for Manila etc.) then just gimme a shout… I’d be very interested in your thoughts (esp. vs. Manila)
Cheers, James
Don’t give up too quick. Comment moderation is a planned 9.1 feature. We will hope you will stick it out a little longer. When you say “security”, are you refering to something like TLS (encryption) or tighter control and oversight capability? Let me know and I will see what we can do to get something included.