Currently doing some work exploring Edublogs, actually CampusPress, for my work. One of the things that I am wondering is the different flavours when it comes to plugins etc … In particular, Jetpack is totally different for Edublogs (and Wordpress.com), compared with .org. I was naive enough obviously to think that they would be the same across all the platforms. Does anyone know and can explain the differences?
Hi Aaron,
The real difference between multisite setups like wp.com, Edublogs, etc. is the amount of control they give you over plugins and themes. Give the large number of users on one install, it makes it difficult to allow users to install any plugins and/or themes they want to explore. Often times this means a select group of themes and plugins with some modifications, this is definitely the case with wp.com, and I imagine it may be with Edublogs and CampussPress, though I have no recent experience with those platforms.
So, in a nutshell, the difference is that with .org sites you get a lot more control than with larger, managed multisite instances like wp.com, Edublogs, etc. Not necessarily a bad thing depending on what you want or need, but the hard realities of managing thousands of sites of one install make it necessary to define definitive barriers for plugins and themes which often are the cause of most of your headaches as a sysadmin.
Best,
Jim
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Thank you @jimgroom. Learning slowly. After spending more time in the garage, lifting the bonnets of several fleet vehicles, I have worked out that Edublogs disable the Jetpack Manage Module. This prevents Jetpack from doing 2-Step Authentication and SSO with WP.com login.
It is fascinating looking at their different setups. Learning so much about power of Wordpress.
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Hi @mrkrndvs, I don’t know about edublogs, but I know on Glow Blogs (Scotland’s national edu blogs) we have had to remove a lot of nice things from Jetpack. Anything that goes against our data protection rules. I’ve got a blog that shows most of the features that we leave.