We’re considering using EE for the next version of our site at my organization, but the ability to post content across multiple weblogs is pivotal for this. Some of our content needs to be shown in different departments of the site, and I’m not quite sure how EE handles that. Is the weblog parameter “category” enough for that sort of thing? If that means everything needs to be posted in the same weblog and then fetched through categories it seems a bit unmanageable.

The ideal solution would be separate weblogs, but a couple of pre-defined sets that allowed us to publish the same content on multiple blogs with the content being synchronized so we don’t have to change all instances.

Is this possible?

MartinHelgesson - 22 May 2008 07:50 AM

We’re considering using EE for the next version of our site at my organization, but the ability to post content across multiple weblogs is pivotal for this.

You cannot post articles to more then one weblog (without duplication them, obviously), as every entry belongs to one and exactly one weblog. But: you can certainly show articles from a number of weblog in various parts of your site.

Some of our content needs to be shown in different departments of the site, and I’m not quite sure how EE handles that. Is the weblog parameter “category” enough for that sort of thing? If that means everything needs to be posted in the same weblog and then fetched through categories it seems a bit unmanageable.

No, you can certainly post to separate weblogs and then decide on a per-template basis which articles tu pull in from which weblog.

Wow, thanks for your fast reply.

I guess that means we’d have to make a separate weblog for each combination of site departments we’d like to publish entries into. That might work, but perhaps not as smooth as we’d like. Am I missing any other way of doing this?

You could be using categories, tags, custom statuses or custom weblog fields. The last may be the easiest to implement, actually. Just a field “departments” with a multi-select pulldown menu, and then restrict your templates to the right combination, showing all articles with department “foo” here, or all which don’t belong to “bar” there. You get the idea.

Certainly sounds a lot better than my suggestion. I guess “Summer Student” might even be to kind a level name for me.

Thanks again for your swift service!
Martin