Scenario: New site for a nonprofit. Like to use MT across the board to allow multiauthoring.

Several of the areas make sense as regular date-based blogs with archives, such as a NEWS blog with different categories, and individual blogs by various board members on their experiences. Also a INC blog for board of directors and financial categories.

EVENTS would cover upcoming and recurring events. Here, rather than a single category, I was thinking of a more customized approach with categories specific to the "events" blog.

We'd also have a TEAM blog, with individual postings for members of the team. Again, these would not make sense as date oriented blogs, so to speak. There would be individual archive pages for each person, which could be edited, and people would be assigned into categories.

There would be additional areas, as well. Here is my approach, and I'd appreciate feedback from MT gurus before I get myself too deep into this.

1) The home index.php file will pull pieces using includes from the various individual blogs. I did not see a way for one blog to pull content from another blog except using includes. Is that correct, or did I miss something?

2) I'll use external files as much as possible to limit the number of individual templates I need to touch.

3) I believe SEARCH will work across all blogs.

4) Looks like I'll need to rebuild individual blogs one at a time, as templates change, unless the change is limited to something a php include addresses. Elsewhere on the support forum I've seen people as for a rebuild all blogs command, and did not see that answered.

In summary, I think that by using this approach I can separate out a "hierarchy" of categories, whereas category hierarchy is not supported by MT 2.51. I can still get site search, and I've got a LOT of flexibility in terms of including various generated lists on the main site index. I'm just a bit concerned that this is likely biting off quite a bit of work, vs. just going with one blog.

Comments? Suggestions?

Thanks!!
Rick@Leaders.net

The multi-blog approach sounds much easier to manage to me, especially if you'll have categories that are more blog specific. You've got a lot going on there. But that's just my opinion, I'm not the person who has to manage it!  :)

1. Yes, includes are the best way, and once you've set them up, it's automated after that.

2. External files are a good idea, especially if you want one design across all blogs. You can create one folder on your server, and reference the templates using a full server path in the "link this template to a file" field for each of the templates. I wrote more here about the actual process of linking a template to a file. Again, once you have them set up, the only thing you'd have to do is upload the new templates to the common folder. If you want different designs for each blog, just use those instructions as is.

3. Yes.

4. Yes, one at a time.

Thanks, girlie! Working on it now. I'm really enjoying this system, although the default templates are surprisingly filled with weird incompatibilities.

Rick

The templates are fully customizable.  :)

What do you mean by "weird incompatibilities" anyway?

Weird incompatibilities means the problems people have had with positioning with default templates/styles when there are only a few entries on the page, and other such goodies.

As someone noted, the templates and styles are totally customizable, and I've been working on them all day and really finding it to be a flexible and worthwhile system.

Someone had mentioned TopStyle Pro which I am using on trial. Very nice package for this kind of work. I still have quite a bit of tweaking to do (that probably never ends does it?), but the site is already a lot better than I had under Radio for our purposes.

Rick@Leaders.net