Elementary Teacher Needs Help with Student Server

My wife and I both teach 5th grade at the same school. We've played MC for a long time here on our home lan and came up with the idea a few months ago to build a server for the four 5th grade classes at our school for them to access at home.
After not getting very far setting it up through our school system due to hardware issues, we got a good deal on hosting and have spent the last several months building the world. We've made tons of educational areas: historic locations, interactive math, reading lessons, etc. Now we're moving on to setting the server up with Bukkit. We had been holding off as the dev build comes along, but were hoping to launch it after the winter break.
Sorry for the long introduction! I've never used Bukkit, so I'm reading everything I can, but have a couple questions.

1 - I was looking to use Worldguard, Worldedit (which I guess I need to setup areas in Worldguard, please correct me if I’m wrong), and Essentials. I was looking at Commandbook, but it seems like most of that is covered in the other plugins I mentioned (please correct me if there’s something handy I need Commandbook for). Should these all work with the current dev build of Bukkit? Should I get the latest dev build of each or the last stable?

2 - One thing that's really worrying me. I did a fair amount of custom spawning with command blocks to make things interactive for the kids. Using testfor if a student passes through a small area, place a block, it would spawn a custom mob (think headless horseman when you walk along a certain part of a path being summoned ahead of you kind of thing.)
But in those areas, I don't want normal mobs to spawn. After all this work it dawned on me, if I set it to deny spawning that will also cut out summoning too won't it?
If I'm right, is there any way around that? Can creatures wander into denied areas? If so, I was thinking.
From what I've read, I was thinking I could define the larger area as denied, then mark off the small section where the creature is summoned to, and make it a child and allow spawning. I really have no idea what I'm talking about and it sounds complicated, but I can muddle through and figure it out if I have a direction.
If that's the best way to go, how big of a space has to be defined for the summon area? A box the size of the mob?

Sorry for the overly long post, I just wanted to give some background on what I'm doing. If there are any other plugins or suggestions that would be beneficial to the students, we would be glad to hear them. Thanks!

 

1. Yes they work with craftbukkit 1.7.2

2. I dont know

 

Thanks for the reply, maybe someone else knows about #2.

 

You can deny spawning for certain types of mobs only. e.g.:
/region flag (name) deny-spawn zombie,skeleton,enderman,creeper,spider,witch
Separate the list with commas.

 

But lets say I want to use a command block to summon a mob within a region where it's set to no spawn. Can I just define a child region inside of the larger no spawn one, and set the child to allow spawning? Then it could spawn, and wander out. Hope that makes sense.

 

One has to be the parent of the other, so the smaller one has no mob-spawning. But you want the bigger one to allow mob-spawning?

 

You can. To do that you will need to make sure that the priority of the child region is set higher than the priority of the parent's. If you need help with this let me know and I can help you out, I used to work at a school district as the IT guy so I would enjoy helping you get this setup. Possibly can do a few smaller plugins for you if you wanted to take it pretty far, if there wasn't something out there already coded.

 

There's always /gamerule doNaturalMobSpawnig false
PS: I wish I could have played Minecraft whilst at school, great idea
PPS: I wish Minecraft was around when I was in school as an excuse for not doing homework XD

 

lucasbuck Make a region that is set to mob-spawning false and do this command /region priority [Region you just made] 2.

 

Just to clarify, if the smaller region is a higher priority it is not what WorldGuard refers to as a child region. It's simply a region which is a higher priority, and does not even need to overlap any other region. Child regions behave differently.

I prefer to use priorities for these types of situations.

 

lucasbuck
You can find all worldguard commands and explanations here http://wiki.sk89q.com/wiki/WorldGuard
Also, if you are using vanilla commands on a bukkit server, there are some commands that are disabled such as /summon

 

Geez, I just noticed that last night. I spent the past few days (off on winter break) learning to setup bukkit, worldguard, citizens, and group manager. Set everything up. Then realized summon and setblock weren't implemented. I have a ton of command blocks that do different interactive things for the kids.
I'm sure it will eventually be added right? I know these are just dev builds. I guess I can just disable the teleports to those areas until they are implemented. I'm just kind of nervous they might not be.

 

lucasbuck

Hey there, firstly, good luck with your server

Of course, the eventual aim of CraftBukkit is to implement all features of the vanilla server but the majority of users seem to see an updated and stable version as a priority. Until then, upon searching around a bit, there appear to be a few plugins offering patches/similar commands to those you require that may be useful until the features you desire are implemented.

It may be worth searching around for a plugin that provides the /summon and/or the /setblock command until the feature is implemented, if you wish to use such a command before CraftBukkit has the feature implemented.