Good news all around, also I like your recommendation on David’s blog for doing all in the department site. You could use role manager to pull that off. But at that point I wonder if the question of why not just use Drupal would emerge. I mean the directory logic and more specific controls and permissions is handled far better in Drupal, but I understand the WordPress interface is a bit friendlier and easier to use. I wonder what’s gotten into me, I usually never recommend Drupal

Starting with one category at least is simple, we just define it as the default category when creating the blog. I sent you an email with the hack… again I would call it a last resort.. but a resort that will work.

I also came up with another way to do this while I was reading David Wiley’s blog and of course confused matters by posting it on his entry http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/970

And finally, yep I will be in Van Rock and more importantly, I will be at Open Ed.

Yeah, you’re right, creating each department as a subdomain would allow you to use the multi-site manager for mapping each departing as it’s own wpmu within one wpmu—nice work.

And if they can’t do that, let me ask you this—would it be possible to have to categories automatically checked in every post of a blog? I’d like to see your hack, and I have yet to search for a plugin to do this, but I’m sure there is one. The trick would be have those categories established when someone created a new blog, but I have to believe this is just a simple matter of writing some code, but what do I know I’ll get in touch with Catherine, and as usual you rule. Will you be in Van Rock in August? I just got my ticket, I’m getting all fired up.

As for you second suggestion, it seems crazy enough to work. As for the plugin you need, I’ve done a hack to automatically add categories (by changing the default ones) but each change had to go into the WPMU source code. Since then I am almost sure I heard of a plugin that does it. I know UBC’s Faculty of Education (the department I did the hack for) have a similar problem and they might have found an elegant solution by now. Catherine Paul (@catherinepaul on Twitter) is the person to contact about any headway that they may have made with a plugin.