Student Webpages?

[keoruac]

I’m a teacher (high school) and I want to give students space to create their own webpage for various projects that I give them throughout the course of the year. I don’t want to use FTP but would rather use a universal control panel that lets them upload, edit, rename, and create new pages right in their browser. I also would rather not have to create individual subdomains for each student, as that could take some time, but would instead rather find a way for them to ‘sign-up’ and it be done automatically. So, these are the questions I have:
1) Is this possible?
And if so…
2) What’s the best way to set this up?
3) What’s the best ‘web page control panel’ to use…preferably free, or somewhat cheap.

Also, I’m using Joomla for my class website if that matters or is an advantage.

Thanks!!

[shadmego]

1. Yes, with some careful, artistic coding
2. You will have to search here for auto create subdomain or something similar. I seem to recall several members a couple years ago talking about doing this with subdomains and email addresses.
3. As far as "the best", it's hard to say and I venture to assume that as many members as we have, you will get as many opinions on how to do this.

Here are two suggestions from me:

1. Joomla! 1.5.4
Community Builder
MyBlog (with CB integration)
RSGallery2 (for photos if you wish)

Total Cost: $45 (MyBlog)
Ease of Install: Easy to moderate

2. Moodle 1.9.2
I'm not as familiar with the extenions of this program, but there are as many for Moodle as there are for Joomla! Moodle also gives you the advantage of being able to directly grade your students' work inside the program. This is because Moodle is an open source, free version of Blackboard, which I'm going to assume you are familiar with.

Cost: $0
Ease of installation: Moderate

~regards, and welcome to the Community!

[sjlplat]

I wrote an application a few months ago for a client that can do this. I would take shadmego's advice and try an open-source alternative. My client paid a pretty hefty price for the script I designed, and you can probably expect the same for something custom tailored to you.