Multiple blogs on one page?

[jrj127]

I would like to have a news section on my site which goes between the logo and the main blog. Can a new blog be added to my site for this news section (no comments, short entries, 2-3 entries viewable)? Basically just quick one-liner updates.

A friend of mine who uses Movable Type said he just has two separate blogs, one for new and one main blog. Can s9y do the same?

[garvinhicking]

Do you want that blog to be a seperate one, or should it have the same content as your "main" blog?

S9y doesn't support the "second blog" concept like MT does, so you'd have to install a new s9y.

If you are skilled with PHP, it could be made easy so that you just embed entries of categories with a different template on the other section. But to explain that in depth would lead too far...

Regards,
Garvin

[jrj127]

My apologies, I should have drawn a little diagram (see below). News and main blog entries are unrelated. For example, I want to announce an event coming up in the summer with my news section. I want that to always be listed above my regular blog. When I add new blog entries they are below the news section.

blog logo
----------------------
news entry summer 2005
news entry winter 2005
----------------------
main blog entry today
main blog entry yesterday
main blog entry last week


Are there plans to implement support for multiple blogs?

What about the ability to add a plugin below the logo and above the main blog (in addition to left and right). I could easily do this news section if I could add a html nugget plugin in the middle portion of the page.

I am not skilled in PHP but maybe I grasp what you are describing. I create a category called "News." When I add entries in the News category they are added to the main blog. Then I use PHP code to insert a news section below the logo but above the main blog. The news section could be just the category view of "News" (like using the category plugin and clicking on it).

Thanks for your assistance!
Jared

[garvinhicking]

What you want to do seems to me like the Concept of "Sticky Posts".

We support that sinec Serendipity 0.8. You can even style those Sticky posts completely different than the other entries via our great Smarty Templating system. The sticky posts can be created by using the "Extended Entry Properties" plugin. Maybe you want to have a go at that and see if it works out? All you'd need is to finetune your "entries.tpl" Template file to seperate sticky posts from usual posts.

There are no plans to support multiple blogs like MT does, though. We think that most of the reasons for having more than one blog can be fulfilled with plugins or other seperations like embedded or shared blogs. Cluttering the code with "multi blog" support IMHO enforces no clean separation of the blogs, but creates more confusion than it solves. So when someone really wants to have two blogs, we recommend to just install two independent blogs. With MT this couldn't be done so easily because of the cgi-bin usage, but with Serendipity you can deploy as many subdirectories as you like...

You can also hook in any sidebar plugin easily within any place in the Smarty template. Just use this:

Code: Select all

{serendipity_showPlugin side='hidden' id="serendipity_html_nugget:12138f723q24f"}

With that, you would display the unique HTML Nugget with the ID (the ID can be found by hovering your mouse over the link inside Plugin configuration, or looking at the serendipity_plugins database table). You could also just show ALL hidden html nuggets with this:

Code: Select all

{serendipity_showPlugin side='hidden' class="serendipity_html_nugget"}

A third option to achieve this is what I tried to point out earlier: You use API method calls (in fact Smarty methods you can include in your template's config.inc.php file) to fetch the entries from a certain category like "NEWS". And then you could just create a simple Serendipity Plugin which hooks into the function where Serendipity usually fetches "all" plugins and tell the SQL there to NOT fetch cateogires from your "NEWS" category. Thus the NEWS category would never be displayed in the usual blog, but only in the place where you specifically fetch the category to be displayed seperately.

I hope I could clarify some issues

Regards,
Garvin

[jrj127]

Wow thanks! That was very simple. I just added the "Extended Entry Properties" plugin and created a new entry, checking the box at the bottom to make it a sticky post.

Later I will edit the style to remove the post date and possibly move the text to the right of the title, keeping it as concise as possible.

Thank you for the quick feedback. This application is very easy to use and powerful.

Cheers,
Jared