does anyone have any suggestions where i can look to get some insight into this?
Sorry if this is easy, I’m a noob, and i’ve searched a lot but cant find anything on this specifically.
So basically you just want one blog with different css applied to different categories?
if so, looks like this was made for 1.2 or earlier… might still work
http://guff.szub.net/2005/07/21/post-templates-by-category/
(looks like they’re working on the extend/plugins section of the site… I’m pretty sure there’s a more recent plugin that does about the same thing.
sort of. and i was looking at similar scripts, but dont think its really what i want.
Let me try to explain better:
I want to have one master list of categories, that either blog can post to.
When i click on a category, i want to show that there are X posts from blog A (in this category) and Y posts from blog B.
each blog would be formatted differently.
am i making any sense? 🙂
formatting the categories differently wouldn’t really work in my case. because they should be able to be used across both blogs.
I’m still not clear why you want two blogs. You may be able to achieve the same results with different authors to categories. You would need to change the themes to take into account the author, but that might work …
Way back in pre-1.5 days, you could configure the back end table by table (hence sharing the cat table), but now the DB layer’s been changed so there’s only one prefix extension for the entire set of DB tables. But since themes, I think there are easier ways of achieving the same results.
HTH, M.
Thanks, it does help. Im new to WP and still trying to figure out what i can and can’t do.
The reason I am thinking 2 blogs is there are 2 “types” of things that can be posted. All authors should be able to post either type.
the 2 (and potentially more) types would be something like a traditional blog post (or article). the second “type” would be something along the lines of a trivia question, basically just a post formated like “Q. what is blah blah.. A. a blah blah.”
both of these “types” could fall under any of the categories, and be posted by any author.
So… I would also need to be able to view all “Articles” or all “Trivia Questions” for any given category. not both types lumped into one list.
Also one type would allow comments, and the other not allow them.
Im not afraid to learn or figure it out. Just looking to see if someone has done something similar or has any other suggestions.
Thanks.
There are many ways to approach this in a single blog, here are a few ideas —
Idea #1.
Did you know that you can post to multiple categories? With that information, you could “facet” your categories.
The trick here is to ensure that the categories are correctly entered. For simplicity, you can use some special character for the format type to the top (categories default in an alpha listing). Then your category “check box area” would look like:
__Article
__Trivia Question
Category 1
Category 2
...
You can set your default category to “__Article”. You could do all this OOB. On the theme/template side, you can check for category membership. (It’s a little PHP) You may actally be able to use the theming engine templates for categories – you can style different categories based on template names.
But you’d still have to filter by the categories themselves. You will have to learn about templates/themes anyway even if you are going the two-blog route. Also, have you considered how to style the mixed set of postings as a search result, etc.? Another reason to look a themes.
Idea #2.
Another possibly more orthodox approach is to use a metadata tag but that would take some work to style.
Idea #3.
Yet another possibility is to use pages for articles and postings for questions – but you’d be faking the categories on the pages by page hierarchy. And you’d be limited to two posting types.
Back to two blogs.
I’ll take a look at how the DB tables are managed, it might not be too bad a hack on the back end – although I loathe back end hacks.
M.
Back to two blogs
Point both blogs to the same category table. OK, it is a one line change in a back-end file but it may not work with future upgrades! The trick is that the category table is defined independently of the posts table. If you do not know PHP well or expect to upgrade frequently I would discourage this. Also keep in mind that this must be done prior to any postings to a non-default category.
There may also be a way to build a plugin to synch up two different category tables. More work but probably safer.
M.
Thank you so much Mary. I am going to look into and experiment with these suggestions. I’m fairly competent with php and mySql. I’ve learned a lot about WP in the past 2 days but still feel i have a long way to go.
One thing I didn’t consider is how to handle the query string – in other words, how to ensure that you are getting the intersection of two cats. There are a few ways to “brute force” this, but there may be a more elegant way with some apis.
Keep in mind that WP is a no-frills tool that can do all sorts of things – there’s a very rich set of user exits that can be exploited along with a theming engine. But the backend is very few DB tables and minimal code – which I find a blessing.
I’m selfishly interested in this problem as well – I’m looking at combining filters of dates, people, places, and things for an historical blog theme I’m putting together using timelines, historical maps, tagclouds, etc. There are 4-5 dimensions I want to filter on by using a combination of metadata to accomplish this. I find an intriguing relationship between pages, posts and their metadata that may be able to produce a theme to handle what I want, but it’s still in the experimentation phase. Oh yes, then there’s the page types – I’ve got historical posts, articles and artifacts to deal with!
M.
I think what I am going to do it using categories.
Im going to try to build a plugin interface that will allow me, as an admin, to select certain categories To act as “post types”. These defined post types, will then appear on the “write post” page as a set of radio buttons, allowing the author to only select one. The admin defined “post types” will then be filtered out from the main/built-in category selection widget.
Then just style everything by the “post type” categories. This should allow me to add new “post types” in the future.
Wish me luck.
