A year later.... I'm still working on this.... Kids ready for Social Security....
Some notes:
Turns out Composer/Mozilla supports WebDAV and Apache 2.0 supports WebDAV pretty easily (that is, I got it up in about ten minutes when I followed SAMS Teach Yourself Apache 2.0 in 24 hours.)
WebDAV is attractive because I think it is easier to install/maintain than an ftp server, and cause kids can drag/drop to from XP or Mac. I don't know how secure it will turn out to be, but with Apache it will follow the std. Apache access directives.
Otherwise on irc, I've been pointed to proftpd a supposedly security conscious gpl'd ftp implementation that also has apache like config files. Security conscious but it still had at least one security hole....
Composer is not kids friendly. Still looking for kid friendly (drag and drop and more) page creation tools.
