Sidebar widgets to track date-based news, calendar, blogs

  • Resolved mattthr

    (@mattthr)


    12 years, 4 months ago

    Hi,

    I’m a microsoft based web developer who volunteered to redevelop my daughters’ school website. To cut a long story short I’ve ended up having to use WordPress even though I know nothing about it or PHP. It’s a powerful and flexible platform and I’ve enjoyed using it so far, but now I’m stuck.

    First of all, the design calls for each class in the school to have its own blog. WordPress doesn’t seem to support multiple blogs without multiple installation which I don’t really want to have to do. So I’m not sure how best to solve this. Each blog has to have its own “space” – a page, containing content, with a unique, direct link. I can give each class its own page and let the teacher edit it, top first, but it feels like a clumsy solution. Is there a better one? Tags or somesuch?

    This requirement is complicated by another feature of the design I’m struggling to implement. To the right of the page there are dynamic features which should display the most recent “news”, “blog entries”, and “calendar events”. Blogs are a problem as we’ve already discussed. “News” is currently just a plain text page. “Calendar” is a just a page pointing at a Google Calendar. I don’t know if there are plugins I can get to help with this, but I imagine some custom coding is almost certain to be required. Anyone help with some suggestions or guides?

    Cheers,
    Matt

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • WordPress doesn’t seem to support multiple blogs without multiple installation

    It does. It’s called Multisite. It’s even got its own forum here. ??
    See create a network.

    To the right of the page there are dynamic features which should display the most recent “news”, “blog entries”, and “calendar events”.

    You’d need to define what you mean by “recent news” in the context of a multisite set up. Extracts from the various sub-sites can be displayed in the top level site using various approaches. With regard to events, you’d need to decide whether you want to stay with the Google Calendar or move to an event management plugin (of which there are many).

    HTH

    Thread Starter mattthr

    (@mattthr)

    OK, got the multisite installed and working. Nice. Some more questions, if you lovely people are prepared to advise!

    What I’ve done is create the main site as a collection of pages. I’m then going to add a sub-site containing only a blog for the various classes.

    I’m not sure how best to handle this. Currently I’ve created a theme and added a single template which is used for the pages which make up the bulk of the site contents. However if I understand correctly, to get this theme onto my blogs, I need to add an index.php page to the theme and apply the theme to the blogs.

    But there’s a problem. I’ve got a dynamic menu built using wp_list_pages. The design calls for a top level “class blogs” page underneath which there will be links to pages, each containing a blog. To do this, I assume I need to create a page for each class blog – trying to work automatic detection and display of sub-sites into the sub-sections of a dynamic menu is likely a colossal pain, right? But if each blog is contained in its own page, how do I display the content in the page.

    Does that make sense?

    Also, feel free to recommend an event manager plugin ??

    Cheers,
    Matt

    I think you now need to post most of these questions in the Multisite forum. In the meantime, have a look through https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/search.php?q=event+manager

    Thread Starter mattthr

    (@mattthr)

    Thanks. Picked an event manager. Will move over to multisite for now.

    Your assistance has been much appreciated.

    No problem ??

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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