Thread

In creating my new site I decided to use multiple blogs instead of categories.

The question i have is in regards to the comment pages.

The way I have my sites, there are different templates used to build a single page. header, body, etc. Currently I need only one ‘body_comments’ because I only use one blog. But i’m trying to figure out if there’s a way to create a single template that can dynamically use different blogs. I’ll see if I can explain.

At the top of the page, or whever you have the ‘weblog:entries’ tag placed, you specify the blog that the data is coming from. But unless I’m mistaken this means if I use 4 different blogs for one site, I’ll need 4 identical templates for the comments pages because I have to specify the blog using hard coding in the template.

Is there a way that this can be changed so I need only create one template? I’d rather not have to create 4 templates to do the same thing, but I can’t figure out how to dynamically specify which blog to use.

what worked for me was to put the following in the head of the comments template

{assign_variable:my_weblog=""}
{assign_variable:my_template_group="main"}

where “main” is the default_site template group and the “” automatically pulls from all the weblogs ...

I use this with my home page to update it with the latest entries from all of the other weblogs

maybe this will work for you?

Embeds with embedded variables are what you want.

In each of of your 4 single entry templates:

{embed="templategroup/weblog_entry_comments" the_weblog="{my_weblog}"}

Then the weblog_entry_comments code is:

<h3>Comments</h3>
<p>{exp:comment:entries weblog="{embed:the_weblog}"}<br />
etc…

I went a step further and did the same approach for my weblog index pages and single-entry views - so all 4 weblogs run from common embedded templates.

Fantastic. Great info. Thanks guys!

I went a step further and did the same approach for my weblog index pages and single-entry views - so all 4 weblogs run from common embedded templates.

Hi Boyink,

I guess you did what I’m looking after.

I’m currently setting up a multi-author site.

Every author will have it’s own blog, but all with the same look. I was wondering if can can run the whole site from only one or two templates.

Something like one template for the site homepage, without comments, trackbacks, etc. And another template for the individual blogs.

Is it possible to do?

I thank you in advance

In my case I run common embedded templates, but each author/blog has it’s own template group with “parent” templates where weblog names and template groups are specified (for link building), blog-specific CSS is stored, and page titles are set.

You’re also going to want to make sure your use of EE falls within the licensing agreement—around the area of not building a hosted blogging service.