Revisiting Wordpress

Yesterday, I met with Fr. Albert to show him how to add students to a blog that he will be using for his "Wisdom of Benedict" course during the upcoming First Term.  Fr. Albert had previously asked about the ability to 'delay' the publishing of a student's post until perhaps it had been reviewed/moderated by the teacher.  I showed him the section about the work-around that I devised about this deficiency of Blogger, and he seemed to understand how to do this work-around.  (read more about it in my previous post detailing the Guide that I wrote for teachers).

Our meeting caused me to revisit the idea function at Wordpress.  The functionality of the Wordpress Dashboard and how it is able to control the privileges of blog participants continues to make Wordpress somewhat more 'powerful' than Blogger.

From the Wordpress Dashboard, a student-participant in the blog could be assigned a role called 'contributor'; in this 'contributor' role, the student can compose a blog entry (which is auto-saved), and then the post must be 'approved' by the moderator-teacher BEFORE the post becomes 'live' and published on the blog itself.  As I already mentioned, this ability/function is not available via Blogger.

Does this mean that we ought to point our faculty to using Wordpress instead of Blogger? I will qualify my answer before I state it.  The intuitive nature of the Blogger Dashboard still trumps the functions available through Wordpress.  Those teachers who are adept enough, perhaps after becoming familiar with Blogger, might consider migrating to Wordpress eventually.  I shall make mention of Wordpress as a provider in the next 'version' of the Guide.

The debate inside my mind about Blogger vs. Wordpress continues because of yet another issue: that of email addresses being 'necessary' in order for a student to become a participant in Blogger.  Wordpress contains a 'hidden' ability to allow a blog moderator to 'create' dummy emails for prospective participants.  On to the next post...