ellenh

Me again.
So I have successfully installed three blogs and integrated them to my site in a satisfactory way (on a test server, not live…). No major problem. I’ve explored some things, like user levels that I’ll be needing and have found that level 3 seems OK for my users. I would have prefered to find a level where the user can add and edit categories but not add any other users. I understand this may be adressed in 1.3.
While exploring this I read the Wiki documentation and am quite surprised to find that what is described doesn’t match what I see. Maybe it refers to a previous version… Anyway, is there any current documentation out there somewhere? I don’t really want to come here and bother you for every little detail. Or is reading the forums the only way to go?
I’ve got some bad habits, like reading manuals. I even buy them! It’s hard to get rid of them (the habits, not the manuals) ??
Next step: getting it to speak French.
Ellen

@root:
The problem that made me think of using blogging software is this. The site is divided into six or seven subsections with old content that doesn’t change at all and new content added once in a while. Even this “new” content is mostly putting online stuff that has been published on paper before. This is all done by hand in DreamWeaver with templates. This may seem archaic but really, most of the work is done beforehand, preparing the content which is either sent to us by the authors in some word processor format, or that we scan from paper when it’s from the pre-personal-computer era. Either way there is a lot of work cleaning it up. Putting it online after that is really fast and easy. The site is optimized to be very fast because some of the pages are quite long. This optimization is possible because the pages are static, as far as I know. For this and other reasons, I haven’t even thought of putting it all in some CMS. Maybe I should, but believe me, I shudder at the work that would be needed. Every two years, for almost ten years now, I change the “look” and it takes quite a bit of time. Next time should be easier because now it’s almost all semantic XHTML and CSS. You don’t want to know how much time that took…
The site is in my profile if you want to look. It’s all in French though.
Some authors now want to have a place to put new content. So, either they write it in a word processor and send it to me to put online, which will take days or weeks, or I give them a way to write and publish directly themselves. I like the second option. So I just want to create a new section for this new stuff with totally independent subsections for each author. The site has a distinctive look with different colors for the different sections. The blog part will have to be styled in a similar way.
About the comments, I’d like to experiment with them but I don’t want to deal with comment spam. The authors wouldn’t do it themselves so it would fall to me and I don’t have the time nor the inclination.
@moshu:
I need an all French interface and the authors will write in French only. A French translation already exists but I may want to tweak it… All those POT and .po and .mo files and whatever put me off a bit, but I’ll get over it.
Ellen

Thanks all. I’ll go and see what I can do on my test server. I also need to have it all in French but I see on the Wiki that it’s possible if not exactly ultra simple…
I’ll post my success… or failure here.
Ellen

Well, that’s a good start. Thanks.
Yes, I do know that WP needs MySQL. It isn’t a problem. Parts of my site are hosted here on a Mac (because of the database we’ve been using for years that is Mac only) and parts of it are hosted elsewhere on a Linux machine. Recent versions of PHP and MySQL are installed on both.
I’ve just installed WP on a test server here running Mac OS X server 10.3.5 and it was a breeze (although I must say that if I didn’t have some experience I would probably have had trouble. Nowhere does it say that the MySQL database must be set up first… and how to do it — unless I missed it). I didn’t do anything about the multiple blogs when I installed WP however so should I start over or can I fix it now?
I prefer the subdirectory idea. It fits better with the structure of the rest of the site (more than 1500 pages…) but actually I don’t know what advantage there would be in using a subdomain instead.
I don’t understand two things at this point.
Why would I need an install for the “main” page? Couldn’t I have just an ordinary static HTML page that linked to the different blogs? I’m just as comfortable writing HTML directly as anything in Textile or Markdown or whatever. And the page wouldn’t change much anyway, unless the idea Podz has is that the main page would automatically show a piece of the most recent posts on all the blogs… Maybe, but is it possible? So, tell me, what would the main install be for?
Second thing I don’t understand is the difference between a multiblog software (what is that exactly?) and a multiple install of WP. From what I’ve read it seems to be a real issue but I don’t see it. Of course this may be because I haven’t really tried anything yet…
Also, and this isn’t really a question for this place I suppose, but you seem a friendly group so I’ll ask anyway. I read in a number of places that TextPattern is more adapted to some situations because it is more a CMS than WordPress. Fine. Is that something I should take into consideration for my project?
Thanks,
Ellen