Questions about merging sites to WP – do I need multiple installations?

  • owen-b

    (@owen-b)


    14 years, 3 months ago

    Hi all,

    This is quite a huge topic with a lot of questions from me, so to begin with I’ll try to reign in my confusion and keep it simple 🙂

    I have 3 sites that run 3 different ‘systems’ and I want to try and consolidate them all into one umbrella site and all running WordPress in one form or another.

    The sites are:

    1) myglasseye.net – this is my photoblog and it currently runs off Pixelpost. I like Pixelpost and I like the way the site currently looks but I was thinking that to be able to achieve what I need I’ll have to consolidate everything to WP.

    2) myglasseye.net/news – this is my news blog where I post occasional articles about photography stuff or whatever. This has always been WordPress and I’m currently trying to make Modularity by Graphpaperpress do what I want it to there. Getting there slowly.

    3) owenbillcliffe.co.uk – this is my portfolio site which runs a Flash slideshow with Slideshowpro and the SSP Director software for content management. Again, I’m happy with the way that’s all looking as well but I want to move away from Flash ultimately.

    The Big Idea:

    a) Make ‘myglasseye.net’ the hub, off of which both the photoblog and news blog is accessible – it should run Modularity and be able to show both featured news posts from the news blog as well as some way of presenting recent images from the photoblog, and then link to my portfolio presentations from the menu bar.

    b) move the photoblog to myglasseye.net/photoblog, take it off Pixelpost and run it in WordPress but ideally look very similar, particularly everything that appears beneath the image, including the dropdown info/comments section. I saw a theme that claims to copy TheWorldIn35mm but in my opinion it doesn’t look the same.

    c) recreate my portfolio slideshows in non-Flash and somehow incorporate them into WordPress as well so that everything is easier to manage. This is less of an pressing issue. Much more concerned with merging the photoblog and regular blog

    Big questions:

    1)If the photoblog is moved to sit in a sub-folder (myglasseye.net/photoblog) and runs from WordPress, do I need two WP installations, one in each folder, to be able to have both the hub&news blog and the photoblog running WP?

    2) if so is it even possible to have the hub access and reference the contents of the photoblog using category tags so that Modularity can display photoblog images in a slideshow or whatever, as the WP installations presumably would be independant of each other? Therefore the category tag trick wouldn’t work, no?

    Cheers!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • s_ha_dum

    (@apljdi)

    14 years, 3 months ago

    You can partially emulate the two-blog effect using categories and query_post() trickery. You can thereby keep the appearance of two blogs but run one instance of WP that shares things like tags, users, links and such.

    Thread Starter owen-b

    (@owen-b)

    14 years, 3 months ago

    Heh – I’m afraid that doesn’t really help littl’ ol’ me!

    Okay, concentrating on the ‘merging my two blogs’ aspect solely for a moment (as I can live with my portfolio being completely seperate for now):

    My Pixelpost photoblog is in one folder (the root, as it happens, currently http://www.myglasseye.net) and my WP installation is in another (www.myglasseye.net/news).

    I want to transform the myglasseye.net front page into a hub page, running Modularity for WP. On that page I want to display a selection of recent posts from my photoblog as a slideshow, and beneath that a selection of featured posts from my news blog.

    To do the first element I would need to change my Pixelpost installation into a WP installation. That’s a big enough job on it’s own but I’ve researched that so I think I know what to do there. Then I could add a ‘photoblog’ category to my WP and set Modularity to display a slideshow of the last 5 posts in the ‘photoblog’ category.

    The problem is that Modularity is a theme that isn’t built for photoblogs – insofar as I’d want to style my WP photoblog theme very particularly and I don’t think you can run two themes at once in one WP installation folder. You can add ‘pages’ like you can with any other theme, but I don’t think you can code a seperate ‘theme’ into those pages in order to work dynamically like my photoblog currently does – or can you?

    So I’d assumed that in order to have two distinctly different themes running (one for the photoblog, the other being Modularity for the news blog) I’d need two installations, but that if I had two installations I wouldn’t be able to reference any of the photoblog content in the Modularity area, because, well, they don’t share any code.

    Am I making any sense?

    If someone can explain how I could have a very particular photoblog style blog running within a Modularity-themed blog so that one could be referenced within the other, or suggest a completely different way of achieving a similar end result in such a way that a WP coding n00b could understand, that would be helpful!

    brandnewaquarium

    (@brandnewaquarium)

    14 years, 3 months ago

    No, you can’t separate themes into pages; however, you can have custom templates for each page you want to have differently – I probably completely do custom page templates in overkill for some of my pages. However, I think for what you describe, you probably will want more than one installation – though, from the eyes of a web designer, this is Bad Practice, simply because it’s always best to have all of your pages to have a similar design to make things easier on a user as far as navigating your site and finding everything goes.

    Thread Starter owen-b

    (@owen-b)

    14 years, 3 months ago

    Okay, I’ve had a wee read of this page in the Codex: http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates

    It seems to describe what you mean.

    Thinking out loud, would the following work:

    I somehow import my Pixelpost photoblog posts into my WP installation (monumental task but I think it can be done). I tag all those posts with the category “photoblog”.

    I then use the principles outlined in the Codex above to style all my ‘photoblog’ categorised posts so that they look like the photoblog I currently have. This will probably require a lot of help from you guys but I know you’re up to the job 😉

    Does that sound feasible?

    If so, is it possible to basically find an existing WP photoblog theme and lift the elements of presentation that I want from it and paste them into the template code for the ‘photoblog’ category?

    Furthermore, will having the “YAPB” (yet another photoblog) plugin help with this? I’ve not looked into using that plugin alongside other WP posts which are *not* a photoblog.

    If I can’t make this work with just one installation of WP there’s no point having two installations – I may as well just keep my Pixelpost setup in that case and forget the original plan. I think I can do it, I’ll just need a lot of help! 😉

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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