interesting use of joomla, but need some technical feedback

[onnojan]

I am a parent volunteer creating a joomla site for a school with 300+ students from pre-K to 5th grade.

I am using joomla in the following capacity, to provide each student, teacher, administrator and involved parent with their own blog -- meaning that there has to be a category for each student, each class activity and then some -- so lets assume 600 categories, organized by teacher and grade in about a dozen sections.

We want to control where the stories posted, so students cannot accidently publish articles to the public part of the site and so the publish on front page is disabled from the front end. This is done easily enough by modifying the template, for example, the html - content - article - form.php file found in the beez template. The problem is that I cannot both restrict the user from having access to the section to choose the place for their article when creating the article, and once the article has been published, to limit their use to that section in subsequent edits.

To restate: when creating an article, I want the student to choose their section, for example, their teacher, and then choose their own category or a subject category under the teacher's section, but when they go back and edit the article, they are no longer able to see the section selection so they cannot change to a section outside of the original section they chose.

My solution would be to create a second copy of the html - content - article form.php and direct the edit article icon to a form2.php file where the section has been commented out.

This way, when a student creates the article, they can choose the section and the category, ( a publisher makes sure that section and category are correct and checks the content before publishing) but when they go to edit the article, all they see are the different categories under the section that they had chosen.

Could anyone comment on this, suggest a better approach or explain how to hack the joomla to redirect the edit article link to the alternate form?

Thanks ,

onno