Hope I can explain this quick & easy. I’m building a site with sections and subsections. Each section is a template group. Each subsection is a blog. Fair enough. But I want some metadata on each subsection beyond the “weblog” field of the weblog:entries tag. With me still? So I created two metablogs called indexes and subindexes. Each entry here corresponds to a section or subsection of the site, with its Title being the Weblog Name and its URL_Title being the Short Name.

The problem is that this stops the index pages of regular weblogs from working. They work again if I remove the url_title of the matching entry in the subindex weblog.

I’m wondering whether this a simple fix or some intrinsic aspect of the system that I’m not seeing.

This is how URLs work.  If you have a URL like site.com/index.php/weblog/url-title it will look for an entry with url-title, and then a template with url-title in the weblog template group.

So, if you have both you’ll have a conflict….

I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to do with this “metablog” data.  Perhaps if you explained your goal then we could offer suggestions.

The goal is to be able to have homepages for each section that have their own introductions before showing the weblog entries for the various weblogs belonging to that section. I’m surprised it hasn’t come up often actually because I’ve had to do it on more than one site when using as a CMS. Yes, this can be done with global variables yes, but I want the site editor to not need access to the Control Panel’s Templates section at all.

Anyway, I found an obvious solution to the problem: the metablogs are never accessed directly, so their url_titles are irrelevant, and I created for them a field called “weblog name”, and this is what is used to compare with the weblogs’ short_names.

So problem solved.