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Hi everyone,

We are building a site for a school and one of the requirements is that every one of their 20 teachers have their own “class blog”. These class blogs will consist of a news page, a calendar page, an “about the class” page, and an “about the teacher” page.

Right off the top of my head, I am imagining one set of templates that would be used by each teacher. Any ideas of how I can structure the channels and templates for this? Would I need multiple channels for each teacher/class?

I’m not entirely sure how I can accomplish this task without having to maintain a yearly maintenance account with the school to add and remove teachers through the years.

Please give suggestions or comments!
Thanks!

Brian

I’d be looking at using the username parameter and populating that with a segment variable

So a calendar page would be something like http://www.domain.com/class/calendar/someuser and in your code use something like this to pull up all the calendar entries for a particular class/user:

{exp:channel:entries channel="calendar" username="{segment_3}"...

Your class bloggers would be in a specific member group, and you could use the query module to pull members to generate the navigation for listing all the classes/bloggers.

That way someone would only have to create a new member into that group and you wouldn’t have to create new templates etc.

This may be too simple for what you’re looking for, but could you set up each teacher as a category for a single blog channel?  Then in your template wherever just loop through the categories for navigation to the appropriate blog?

Those are great ideas, I’ll experiment with both of those. The username parameter seems like the most foolproof way.

Jeremy, maybe I could use your idea but modify it by using a required Playa field with all of the teacher’s names… I’m worried about teachers forgetting to check the correct category name.

Thanks for the help!