WordPress as a Magazine

  • Okay, so I’ve read a lot of the other magazine-related posts, but I think what I want to do is more unique (and more difficult):

    Rather than putting out monthly publications, my magazine is going to be seasonal, so let’s say for the year 2007, I’ll have 4 issues: Winter 2007, Spring 2007, Summer 2007, Fall 2007.

    I tried to think of a good way to do this using post dates, but then gave up on that in favor of using categories. So I’d have this:

    Category: 2007
    Subcategory: Winter
    Subcategory: Spring
    Subcategory: Summer
    Subcategory: Fall
    Category: 2008
    etc…

    Here’s my problem: I have three crucial pages, the home page, the article pages, and the archive. The article pages and the archive pages are simple, but I’m having some difficulty trying to figure out how to do the home page…

    What I want to do: I want the home page to “know” what the most recent subcategory is. Either by category_id, or the date of a post within said subcategory, etc. So for example, let’s say I’m working on gathering material for “Fall (subcategory) 2007 (category),” so I have it set as hidden, but when I have the material complete, I hit “publish” or something like that…

    Basically, as soon as I get to the “what I want to do” part, I get lost. Can anyone help me out, either conceptually (maybe there’s an easier way) or scripting-wise?

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  • interessted in what you′re writing, but i simply don′t understand the part after ‘what i want to do:…’

    I am trying to do something similar — a WP based quarterly magazine.

    What I’m trying to set up is that the HOME page shows a table of contents of the MOST RECENT QUARTERLY issue (I have a lot of that part set up using tips from Darren Hoyt’s great tutorial on a magazine template).

    Rather than the category approach bryklaus describes, I’m trying for the date approach.

    My idea is for the editors to assign a single date to all posts from a given issue (e.g. the Spring Issue posts would all have the date April 15 2007). That way it will be easy to pull up a whole issue from the archives (in theory, anyway — I have a feeling it won’t be so easy for me to set up).

    But on the home page, I want to show the LATEST issue. What I’d like to do is somehow query the posts so that it checks for the LATEST month of posts — not necessarily THIS month (there might not be any new posts this month, since it’s a quarterly) but the MOST RECENT month.

    I can kind of think of how this might be done (look to see if there are posts THIS month, IF NOT then look in the month before that, etc.) but this is beyond my extremely rudimentary PHP skillz.

    Any suggestions? I’m thinking it would be something with query_posts or get_posts, but can’t figure out how to set it up…

    I’m working on a similar problem–a magazine based on issue, not date. My idea is to use the_meta template tag and insert a custom field into each post. For example, every post in a particular issue has the issue number as the key and the issue title as the value.

    This is as far as I’ve gotten, but the plan is to then create a query for the post-meta-key. In theory, I think I can then organize all the content based on the meta data that I’ve attached to each post.

    Right now I only have the current issue up. I’m working on the archives, which will be the true test of my theory! See the site here: https://sharkreef.org/

    I’ll post again once I have made some progress (I hope!)

    Cool site – I’m also working on a literary journal but it’s not populated yet and many aspects are still rough while I’m figuring out how to organize the issues (we’ll move it over to the real URL when it’s done).

    I’m intrigued by your post-meta-key idea, please let me know more. Feel free to contact me through my WordPress account – sounds like we’re working on a very similar project. I’m also interested to know how you are handling authors.

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