Thread

The Expression Engine install at our school is currently set up with a few different blogs, including a News blog, Students blog, and various department blogs. I am looking for ways to “promote” posts from the department blogs to the main news blog without re-entering them.

One way I have come up with is to make sure all the blogs are using the same category group, and then have the News blog show all posts categorized as “News” from all the blogs around the school. There are a couple of downsides to this though - for one, as we add more blogs and categories, the shared categories group risks becoming a bit unwieldy. I think this will also make showing category archives per blog harder. Finally, I can’t see a way to let people post to their department blogs while restricting them from promoting their posts to the front page (other than the SAEF).

Has anyone done anything like this? Is there another way to do it that I’m missing? Thanks for any help!

Mark

Has anyone done anything like this? Is there another way to do it that I’m missing?

I’ve had similar problems with a few sites and found two useful solutions.

1 - for multiple sites or weblogs on a single EE install I created a “promo” weblog which does nothing but pull Title, URL, and summary/blurb from various weblogs into a template, and that template gets embedded elsewhere as if it were an advertisement. Setup is rather straightforward, of course, but managing the “promo” pieces can be an issue as they tend to grow in number.

2 - for multiple sites on multiple EE installs I simply use OpenX, the open source ad server application. It installs like EE on PHP and MySQL and is easily managed, whether using it for actual advertising, or simple promotions pointing to other sites, articles, sections, or whatever. It’s far more powerful than EE for promotions, but provides better tracking, too. The downside is that you’re stuck using HTML/CSS, Flash, or graphic/images, and you still have to drop in the OpenX code to a template in EE.

If the two weblogs share field, status, and category groups you can move an entry from one to the other.  Another option is to use one of the Clone extensions to copy the entry into the promotions weblog.

I suppose I could also make a custom field called “featured” and make sure all the blogs share the same field group. Then pull posts where that field is set to “true”. Basically the same idea as making them all share a category group, although it would preserve the ability to have blog-based category archives without having to show all the blogs…

Thanks for the ideas!