Best Practice – Magazine-style Multiblog?

  • Alright… I’ve done quite a bit of work with WordPress in the past. I’m not new to it at all. BUT, I’ve never set up a WP MU site, or any kind of multiblog.

    What would be the best way to set up the following:

    • A magazine style entertainment site with multiple blogs (kinda like wired)
    • Persistent navigation and advertising across the entire site (all blogs)
    • Though navigation and ads are shared, I need to be able to apply blog-specific themes to add different headers and colors (like IGN.com)
    • All blogs must show up on the front page (magazine style)
    • Each blog is a -part- of the site, not a separate site. Similar to IGN.com

    The trick is making this as cohesive as possible. I don’t want users feeling like they are on more than one website. And I don’t want to have to adjust the navigation menu on every blog every time we add a new one.

    What’s the simplest approach to accomplishing this type of site? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated, as my company is depending on me to pull this off!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • A good idea would be to use categories for your posts, and then set up certain pages to display only certain categories. Let’s say for example you have categories “News”, “Articles”, and “Opinion”. For the “News” page, you can use query_posts() right before the loop, something like this:

    query_posts('category_name=news');
if ((have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();

/* php/html for posts in the loop */

endwhile;
endif;

    For pages such as the home page, where you need to display all the categories or multiple categories, I’d recommend using multiple loops. Here’s an example of one of the loops:

    $news_query = new WP_Query('category_name=news');
if ($news_query -> have_posts()) : while ($new_query -> have_posts()) : $news_query -> the_post();

/* php/html for posts in the loop */

endwhile;
endif;

    You can create as many new queries (and therefore loops) as you need for each category.

    Hope that helps.

    Thread Starter justaleaf

    (@justaleaf)

    I like this idea ok… but the problem is, I’m not going to be doing all the blogging. We’re going to have a different person man each of the individual blogs that make up the site. And they’re guest bloggers, so they’re going to want per-post credit.

    So, I’m thinking it has to be an MU site.

    The problem I have with MU is, though, that it seems to seperate the blogs quite a lot and make it difficult for me to keep the whole site cohesive.

    I suppose I could hardcode a navigational include to the templates so that, even though there are many templates, I can still edit the navigation from one location. while I’m at it, I suppose I could have all the CSS files import a master CSS for ads and and other things.

    I was just kinda hoping there was a simple way to integrate them.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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