WordPress for many research projects

  • Resolved kedmond

    (@kedmond)


    16 years, 9 months ago

    I work in a Physics lab where there are numerous projects going on at any one time. There are also several old projects that are not being worked on any more, and may or may not ever be worked on again. I’ve been wondering if a local installation of WordPress could be used in our lab to document progress and recent results for all of these projects. Some projects have a single person working on them, but the results would be very interesting to others. Meanwhile, other projects have 2-4 people working on them and a blog could really help keep track of everyone’s contributions.

    I’ve been maintaining a blog for my own research on WordPress.com for quite some time, and it’s been incredibly helpful. However, I’m unsure how to make a single “Lab Blog” work for multiple users.

    I’m thinking that each post could be categorized (using wordpress’s categories) under a different project name, and then sub-categorized with tags. I think the main/first page of the blog should just be a lab welcome screen, with pictures linking to the different projects. Each link would take you to a different project “Page”. On that project’s Page would be all the posts relating to that project, listed in the standard reverse-chronological order.

    To try this all out, I installed WP 2.8 (plus PHPMyAdmin and MySql 5.1) on a slow PC running Ubuntu 9.04. WP is running great now, but I don’t know how to implement the things that I’ve described above. For instance, how does one make the blog’s central/main page just a static page that links to all the projects? And then each project page should be a “Page of Posts” I think. So I found the template PageOfPosts.php but I can’t get that to work since the template doesn’t even show up as an option in the template menu when I make a new page.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

    -Kazem

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Lucian Florian

    (@fldtrace)

    16 years, 9 months ago

    You do it like you said:

    – create categories for each project
    – you can display the categories using wp_list_categories()
    – with posts, assign them to their specific category

    If you want to setup a different page for home, go in control panel, reading options and there you have a static page. Choose it for home page.

    However, you need to create a special template for that, where you need the code for displaying categories, or simply link them manually.

    Thread Starter kedmond

    (@kedmond)

    16 years, 9 months ago

    Looks like I’m going to need to learn how to write some templates! Thanks for the advice.

    @mercime

    (@mercime)

    16 years, 9 months ago

    make the blog’s central/main page just a static page that links to all the projects

    In addition to the good suggestion above, you might also consider using WordPress MU – add new blog/users for each project and aggregate news or results of each project in home page of main blog. You can archive the project sub-blog after you’re done with the project and just add new project sub-blog and users when you have new.

    Thread Starter kedmond

    (@kedmond)

    16 years, 9 months ago

    WordPress MU is something I messed around with earlier. But I didn’t know how to “aggregate” them together. This might be a better idea, however.

    Instead of aggregating posts, and instead of using a “PageOfPosts” from different categories, I could just have a link on the main page to the different blogs.

    @mercime

    (@mercime)

    16 years, 9 months ago

    There are some WPMU-specific plugins which will help you in managing the presentation/output of your projects, check the site out. e.g. There’s the Sitewide Recent Posts Plugin for WPMU which allows you to aggregate the latest posts from each project/blog.

    Then, when you’ve decided to shift to WPMU, forums – http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/
    Good luck.

    Thread Starter kedmond

    (@kedmond)

    16 years, 9 months ago

    Thank you!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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