I administer a site for a K-8 school where the teachers are keen to use the Blog module to communicate with students and parents.  We would like for each teacher to have a personal blog for news relevant to their homeroom students, and a shared blog for the middle school teachers to post homework assignments.  The homework blog entries would have tags with the academic subject (math, social studies, science, etc.) and the grade level.

I am running into a few challenges setting this up and am wondering if I am missing something or if perhaps the software just isn't there yet.

Once you setup a personal blog, whenever you click the "blog settings" button from any page with the blog module, you go into the settings for the personal blog.  Can a user participate in managing settings of both a personal and an "all bloggers" shared blog?  Do I need to have a "fake" user account setup that has no personal blog just so they can adjust settings on these shared "all bloggers" blogs?

For filtering by tag, the best I seem to be able to do is to hack the URL by adding the tagid at the end of the URL (/tabid/550/tagid/9), which I guess I could use as the canonical link for a filtered view (use it in the site menus for example rather than just loading the page/tab unfiltered).  I don't see any way to filter by multiple tags at once (for example if I had tags for grade and subject, I can't seem to figure out how to view all 8th grade math entries.)  Is there some other way?

Similarly I can't see a way to filter anything in the RSS feed by tag, which I guess means I cannot have a feed just for 8th graders for example if one author publishes articles for multiple grades.

During the course of testing and configuring the module, I often see it revert to a state where it displays every blog article on the portal.  On the shared homework blog (authoring mode "All Bloggers"), sometimes I see content from the personal blogs "leaking" into the shared homework blog.  Clicking the "Blog Settings" button and Update (with no changes) usually fixes this.

Once I started using the tags, I noticed they show up on every blog on the portal, even if that (personal) blog has no articles with a given tag.  For example a kindergarten teacher's personal blog will show a tag cloud with tags such as "8th grade", which when clicked, does nothing since the kindergarten teacher has no blog articles tagged with 8th grade.

Regarding the tags, I see a tooltip if I hover and saw a blog post indicating that you could see a more detailed description of the tag...where are these detailed descriptions maintained?

Right now I am thinking I need to step back from the two-dimensional tag approach (grade and subject) and maybe just have a tag for homeroom posts and a tag for each grade level of middle school, using the blog post title to convey the academic subject.  We would remove the tag and category parts from the personal pages to avoid the current confusion over why a tag saying "science" shows up on the kindergarten teacher's blog where there are no posts with that tag.

I can't help but feel I am missing something fundamental with the configuration and filtering...why have tags and categories if their use for filtering is so limited?  The whole "personal" vs. "all bloggers" approach feels a bit odd and was hard to grasp at first (I don't reject the idea that my understanding is flawed and is leading to my challenges getting it configured to my requirements).  For example, what if one author needed multiple personal blogs?

Sorry...I know this is a bit rambling.  If there is a great resource out there that would help answer many of these questions I would appreciate any pointers to it.