manstraw

I was in your site back when you made a guest password available. I ‘saw’ it, but didn’t retain everything I saw. Doing each assignment as a category makes perfect sense of course. I might have thought of that if I had a teacher mind. 🙂

I’m putting that grade plugin thing on my pile. I have no idea when I’ll get to it, as the pile is a bit high right now.

@davidchait – I’ve never touched mu. Don’t know a thing about it. If I still wanted to write a plugin for a private message as I’ve described, would I be looking at pretty much the same task? Or would mu present me with some extra learning? I’ll basically be writing everything to an extra table in the database, and refer to post a post number.

You would be safer if you just saved a version after you delete the names column. No chance of hacking the names if they’re not there!

You just mentioned that the students are spread across different blogs? I thought this was all one blog.

In the spirit of keeping this frontpage less, or more to the point, entirely in wordpress, I think what you (or any teacher) really need is a custom plugin specifically for managing grades. Let me know if something like this might work …

Student composes assignement, or perhaps attaches assignement as a .pdf in wordpress as a post. There should be another field of information with the post that includes an assignment name or number. (Do you already have that? how do you know which assignment it is?) You, as a teacher read the assignment, and click an option to write/edit a grade and comment. This is not a regular comment in the wordpress sense, but a separate box of information that is bound to the post. Only a person with sufficient priviledge will be able to edit that data, and only the student/user and teacher will be able to see it when they are logged in. It could also send an email to student if the appropriate option is selected upon an edit. You as a teacher have access to a page that will display a list of the grades organized by assignment, or student, and optionally generate an excel spreadsheet.

I believe the above wouldn’t be terribly difficult to code. I’d like to know if you think that would work for you, and where you would change it. I’m also thinking about my brother the teacher, and may wish to put my time into something like this so he could benefit as well. I know how to code it outside of wordpress, but would need to study wordpress a bit to know how to properly integrade it as a simple plugin.

thanks for that info Tom. handy to know.

It seems there is a plugin to do a search and replace.

http://thedeadone.net/?p=183

Did you set $url to the feed you want to capture from before the calling code? Make sure the path to magpie is right in the require_once line.

require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';

$url = 'http://www.kwak.org/blog/category/outdoor/feed';
$rss = fetch_rss($url);

echo "Site: ", $rss->channel['title'], "<br>
";
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
$title = $item[title];
$url = $item[link];
echo "<a href=$url>$title</a></li><br>
";
}

When you say they are restricted to posting in their own categories, do you mean they each get a uniquely named category? Perhaps you don’t need categories, but instead do your page display based on users. In other words, have everyone post to the default category, and have links in the side bar for that users posts. Did that make sense?

you could get yourself magpie rss and use that to draw from your blog on your website page. it’s beyond the power of a plugin to put something on a standard webpage outside of the control of wordpress.

http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

I’ve recently switched to using wordpress to do entire websites. I used do it like you, where I had the blog and a separate website. I’ve found it easier to just use the pages aspect of wordpress to create the other pages.