Thread

In the last forum thread that I posted, I asked if anyone had any ideas for including the blog/blogger name in the URL. I didn’t exactly get many replies, which has led me to believe that I may be barking up the wrong tree.

So, if I may, let me take a step back and ask a more basic question…

I am creating a magazine-type website. One of the major parts of this site will be the “Blogs” section. The site was created in MS FrontPage about 10 years ago, and is in desperate need of a CMS. Obviously, I have chosen EE.

The most straightforward way it seems to make a section with lots of blogs by different people would be to do the same as the EE website apparently does: Make a template group called ‘blog’ and a template called ‘entry’ to display each blog posting.

However, the site I am working on emphasizes the individual bloggers who are regular contributors to the site and I feel as though this emphasis should be carried through in the URLs. If you look at the zdnet.com blog, for example, you will see that each writer has their own ‘area’ which is accessed via blogs.zdnet.com/this or blogs.zdnet.com/that—I think this works well for a magazine style site as it helps to semantically organize the information by author or the name of the blog.

However, given the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way of doing this in EE, and given the silence that I was met with in the last thread I started, I am willing to consider other ways of doing this. All I am after is advice and suggestions for organizing the information from a URL point of view. Has anyone else created a magazine-style site like blogs.zdnet.com with lots of bloggers? How did you go about organizing URLs?

joe_d, part of the reason you may not have received a response is that you may be straying into a no-no with EE - a hosted blogging solution.

What I would do first is contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with your idea and make sure it’s not going to be a problem.

Make sense?

Don’t know if this will help, but what about using categories with the name of the bloggers?
If you use the full category name as URL, instead of “C1” etc, that would look a lot better.

I actually did try a similar thing on an experimental site I set up a while ago, but never finished. What I did was to use segments and username together like this:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="bloggen|mobilbloggen" sort="desc" status="open" username="{segment_2}”}

It was really just an experiment, but the site’s still there if you want to have a look 😛
http://www.clickflip.se/index2.php/bloggar/users

Note: This was never meant to be a hosted solution 😉

Thanks, André, I’ll take a look at what categories can do. The only thing is that I am hesitant to use usernames as a variable because there’s no way (as far as I can see) to prohibit a user with Control Panel access from changing their username.

Sue, I understand what you’re saying but I really don’t see how this could apply to a site with an exclusive group of 10-15 bloggers who are all working together with different niches of the same subject matter. We’re talking about something like zdnet.com, not blogger.com.

If this is an issue, then I think that this thread would benefit from an official statement from EE Sales, so that other people searching for this subject will be aware of policies/interpretations of the license agreement without having to individually email them.

I realize that giving support on this issue could potentially aid someone in setting up a Blogger-like service built on EE (a clear license agreement violation), but if what I am trying to do does not constitute a license agreement violation then I think that I deserve the same support that anyone else would get. Otherwise, if what I am doing is against the terms of the license, then I deserve a response politely telling me to stop what I am doing; in which case I will cut my losses on the $249 license fee I have spent on this particular project and go and find another system :down:

I agree. We need some kind of definition on what “hosted weblogging service” actually means to EE.

Yes, a clarification is very much needed.

It seems strange that so much work has apparently been put into user/group management in the Control Panel if it is true that the only legal use of EE is to have one author per site/license.

If this is indeed the case, it would also make EE prohibitively expensive since the licenses needed for the site I am creating (15 authors) would be about. Not to mention the increased costs relating to the logistics of managing 15 installations of EE in different directories just for one website?!!?

I’m fairly sure that a hosted blogging solution would encompass sites specifically created to provide blogging accounts to “joe public” rather than a magazine type site that gives its regular contributors an area to blog. I certainly hope so or I will be looking for another CMS solution.

It’s always been clear to me the difference as Flatulent Badger has described. I think where the confusion comes is that users don’t describe their use well - co-authored site vs. blog platform - hence the “contact sales” recommendation.

I think I was pretty clear about what I want to do in my initial explanation. Even if I wasn’t 100%, I gave further clarification in response to Sue’s post.

Anyway, I have just emailed sales to draw their attention to this post. Let’s see what happens….

... a site with an exclusive group of 10-15 bloggers who are all working together with different niches of the same subject matter ...

QUESTION?

Would you like for each of the 10-15 bloggers to have different templates? themes? styles? to their ‘section’ or blog?
If so, then I might suggest using a separate weblog for each author/blogger.

If not, than you may differentiate each blogger/author by category.

Have you toyed with ExpressionEngines Member Module enough to know how best to use it?

QUESTION?

Would you like for each of the 10-15 bloggers to have different templates? themes? styles? to their ‘section’ or blog?
If so, then I might suggest using a separate weblog for each author/blogger.

Hi OrganizedFellow, thanks for responding!

Each blog has exactly the same styles which is why it seems like a good idea to come up with a way to implement this without having to set up lots of templates or weblogs.

If not, than you may differentiate each blogger/author by category.

Yes, this is exactly the way that I have been thinking.. but I’m going around in circles: All of the blogs have the same templates/themes/styles so it seems silly to make a separate weblog and template for each one. However, if I don’t do this then there doesn’t seem to be any way to ‘insulate’ the bloggers from each other. Your idea of using categories would work in theory, but it would be too easy for one of the bloggers to accidentally choose the wrong category and for his post to end up posting to someone elses blog.

The functionality to separate weblogs already exists in EE, and it does makes sense to use one template and lots of weblogs. After all, that’s what they are. My initial idea was to make one generic template which accesses the {segment_2} variable which, in turn, calls the relevant weblog. So, a call to example.com/blogs/weblog-name/ would go straight to the “index” template in the “blogs” template group which would be set to catch {segment_2} which would be “weblog-name”.

This would be prefect, because it would support one user with more than one blog. It would also support multiple users posting to one single blog if we wanted it to.

The only problem I see with this is the fact that it would get unmanageable over time. There are only about 15 bloggers right now, but the site has been running for 10 years, and at least 50 people have come and gone during that time.

Although it is possible to set user permissions so that the individual bloggers will only see their own weblogs in the menu, the person in charge of the overall site (Super Admin) is going to have to deal with this growing list of weblogs. It just doesn’t seem like the optimal solution. Weblogs from past authors don’t get deleted just because that author stops blogging for the site.

Although it is possible to set user permissions so that the individual bloggers will only see their own weblog in the menu, the person in charge of the overall site (Super Admin) is going to have to deal with this growing list of weblog.

There is at least one extension that hides weblog from the control panel.

It just doesn’t seem like the optimal solution. Weblogs from past authors don’t get deleted just because that author stops blogging for the site.

No, but you could move them over to a generic weblog. All things considered, I’d go the one author, one weblog route here.

Hi Ingmar,

There is at least one extension that hides weblog from the control panel.

I’m having trouble locating an extension that does this by searching for the obvious on Google. Would you happen to know which extension(s) can do this?

No, but you could move them over to a generic weblog. All things considered, I’d go the one author, one weblog route here.

As far as I can tell, moving articles over to a generic weblog would mean going into each entry individually and changing the weblog. There is no way to mass-update, is there?

I guess that an extension that hides old weblogs from the Control Panel would be the best solution… as long as it’s a well-supported extension that won’t break with a future EE upgrade.

I’m having trouble locating an extension that does this by searching for the obvious on Google.

This search leads to this thread, where you can download Mark Huot’s Hidden Weblogs etxension.

As far as I can tell, moving articles over to a generic weblog would mean going into each entry individually and changing the weblog. There is no way to mass-update, is there?

An SQL query could do that easily. There really is not much more involved than changing the weblog_id.

Ok, thanks Ingmar, that’s enough for me to work with. I’ll have a play around and then post here again if I get stuck.

Once I’ve sorted everything out, I’ll also post what I did here in case anyone else finds it useful!