Thread

So,

I’ve used EE for a while, stepped away from blogging due to life happening and come back.

I am now creating a website using EE for my community’s civic association, and made some mistakes (luckily its not production yet) and I have started to fix them…

The biggest mistake I made was using categories instead of weblogs for ‘subsections’ of the site. Each committee’s chairperson needs to have the ability to update their posts, but not be able to post in another committee’s area - so categories wont work as I see it… Rip those areas out and start making weblogs for each committee.

Here’s where my confuddlement starts 😊 :ahhh:

I will have about 20 or so blogs - one for each of the committees, one for general news, one for each of the Area Board of Directors, etc… i’d like each to look the same, but with slight modifications depending on the weblog in question… for example, different banner images, different Title, but the colors and layout and “menu bars” to be the same. So obviously I dont want to have to manage a 1:1 relationship of template group:weblog.

Is there a way to use EE Tags such as { segment } etc to determine the Weblog short name?

Currently “site” is the default template group and if I go to http://foo.com/index/ it uses the site templates… and serves the default_site weblog - what I want it to do…

What would the URL segmentation be for a weblog “social” using the template “committee”?
http://foo.com/index/social/committee ?  /index/weblog/template_group ?

Is there a good howto or other documentation for a first foray into multiple weblog design and management?

My site use to have multiple columns, a new blog for each.  But of course, each person needed their own member group, and it took forever to duplicate.

So I came to my senses and made a single blog for all of them.  I separate them by author.  So I can pull their posts by segment.

<a href="http://www.popsyndicate.com/column/author/chrischris">http://www.popsyndicate.com/column/author/chrischris</a>

So, now you have one blog that they can all edit?

I wish i could do that, then I could keep categories and not blogs… but I have a business rule that the Chair of Committee Foo cannot add or edit posts for Committee Bar

All that I have read in the docs is that in order to meet that requirement, I need a separate blog for each committee, and a member group for each committee for security ...

Or am i suffering from a cranial-rectal infraction?

They can all edit, but the group defines them only allowed to edit the posts they create.  User X can only add or edit posts by User X.

I guess the only way around your requirements—that I can see—is to use the honor system.

How many committees/members are you dealing with?

We have about 12-14 ‘major’ committees that would be included in the site (with 1-2 posters in each committee… and a single person could be in multiple committees), and 9 “areas” that has a Board of Director—although they can all post on a “BoD weblog” with each area a category ... using the ‘honor’ system. So lets say 15-17 blogs

What I have now is a base test site (http://imlca.hoke.org/) that uses categories for each of these ... and the pages module for contacts, bylaws, rules/regs, etc)...

What I see changing is that each committee will be a weblog with no categories. I created a test template_group called “committees” and a test weblog “aesthetics” for that committee… http://imlca.hoke.org/index/committees/aesthetics

What I probably need is more coffee and a day off work to sit down and remap the entire project from scratch 😉

Edit: what I really need is a howto on setting up multi-blog sites and the management thereof… do I really need a 1:1 ratio of WebLog:Templates for example?

Granted, I could probably strip 95% of the markup out and into a generic template group that is called by a weblog specific template, but that would get ugly fast 😊