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Thread: Website / Blogging

  1. #1
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    Website / Blogging

    I've finally decided to do something about a domain I bought 5 years ago. Actually, I want to do a lot of things, but I am not too sure what's the most sensible way of going about that.

    In the old days, I would've hand-coded everything, and it probably would've looked something like this:

    domain.com/(index)-> The front page with link to other part of the sites. As an example, let's say that I want to document my travels, and write game reviews.

    So I'd have:

    domain.com/travels/japan01/1.html, 2.html, 3.html etc.
    domain.com/travels/japan02/1.html, 2.html, 3.html etc.
    domain.com/travels/amsterdam01/1.html, 2.html, 3.html etc.

    domain.com/games/<title01>1.html
    domain.com/games/<title02>2.html

    In fact, if I end up working quite a bit on both, I may even a suitably named domain for project.

    Simple, but perhaps too primitive. I don't know anyone doing things this way nowadays. It's all about WordPress, and I am quite happy to see if I can make nicer pages in lesser time after investing some time on it.

    The main question I have is, does it make sense to lump it all together (keeping in mind that I've only put two examples of things I may have on the site - and I may also maintain my site in more than one language) and simply use tags to narrow down entries?

    Or is it better to keep two WordPress installations, in different directories? Some of my family may have zero interest in games, so it would be handy if I can just link them to domain.com/travel. Is it a pain to split/combine WordPress blog together?

  2. #2
    Mostly Me Lucio's Avatar
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    Re: Website / Blogging

    I'd suggest multiple installations of Wordpress, each in their own folder (use a table prefix for each one the same as the folder name)

    Then use sub-domains for each folder and a link off the main page

    (\___/) (\___/) (\___/) (\___/) (\___/) (\___/) (\___/)
    (='.'=) (='.'=) (='.'=) (='.'=) (='.'=) (='.'=) (='.'=)
    (")_(") (")_(") (")_(") (")_(") (")_(") (")_(") (")_(")


    This is bunny and friends. He is fed up waiting for everyone to help him out, and decided to help himself instead!

  3. #3
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    Re: Website / Blogging

    Or use something like Drupal to create your own bespoke Content Management System. Wordpress is good (no, excellent) for blogging, but possibly a little limited for what I think you are trying to do. However one way might be to have a static front page with links to individual blogs, but not as slick as having a seamless appearance.
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    Re: Website / Blogging

    I think I'd be tempted to stick with one installation and use WordPress categories; they can be hierarchical, so you could have "japan" and "amsterdam" under "travel", or you can use both categories and tags, maybe a "travel" category with "japan" and "amsterdam" tags.

    You can specify a category filter in the URL, so you could send a link like "(domainname)\category\travel" to people for just that bit, maybe even have different designs for different categories, though that's not something I've tried myself. If it doesn't really work out I *think* you could export entries, filtered by category, to another installation, but not 100% on that.
    Last edited by Zoso; 19-05-2011 at 03:07 PM.

  5. #5
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    Re: Website / Blogging

    Thanks for the input everyone.

    I thought about the suggestions, and some Googling, and I am leaning towards keeping my travels under one blog (which shall be my initial focus on first). The reason for that is, I am not sure if it makes sense to have a WordPress install and sub-domain for each places I visit. I am concerned that it would be a pain to manage what would effectively become multiple sites with perhaps not enough content to justify it. This is effectively what Zoso has suggested but I may consider other blogs I want to work on a completely different theme.

    I'll also stick with WordPress for the time being because it seems more user-friendly, and I kind of want to start pumping out content as I've procrastinated far too long already

    For at the moment, I have:
    domain.com/<currently empty but I'll most likely add a profile and link to the sole blog I have:
    domain.com/travel(blog location)

    I'll now shift to WordPress oriented questions:

    1. Permalinks: Does the structure matter?
    Originally, I wanted my permalinks like this: domain.com/travel/location/YYYY/MM/DD/pagename.
    It's a mouth full, but it's descriptive. At most, I might drop the date, but I was definitely hoping the /location/ after domain.com/travel
    I was going to get "location" from %category%. Logical. descriptive. Unfortunately, a bad idea from a performance perspective.

    Now I suppose (haven't tried, but see no reason why it shouldn't work if "archive" is done exactly like that) that I could hardcode the country name. As long as I pay attention and remember to make changes when I write about a different trip, I'll get the result that I want.

    Before I go ahead though, as I do not want to deal with the hassle of changing my permalinks), I would like to ask if an organised but long url is actually a good thing. "domain.com/travel/location/YYYY/MM/DD/page name" says it all, but it's not like anyone, myself included, will remember it.

    The other extreme (default setting), is to simply have domain.com/travel/?p=###

    Looking at that, you'll only know that it a page about my travel. You don't know where I went or when, only when I published the page relative to the other pages. But are there any scenarios where it matters? If someone is already in my blog, it won't matter as they can navigate through the links. If I, or anyone else want to refer back, the url of the permalink would probably be hidden behind a link text anyway.

    Am I missing something obvious here?

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    Re: Website / Blogging

    I've never really considered permalinks to be honest; like you say, unless it's important to get some context from the URL itself I can't really see any major problems with the default "?p=(postID)". I've gone with one of the standard "pretty" versions myself, "/year/month/day/post-name", which makes it a bit more readable, and if you wanted to get, say, a country name in there you could always include it in the post name perhaps.

  7. #7
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    Re: Website / Blogging

    Wordpress is pretty flexible in regards to URL structure and categories.

    Although I prefer proper CMS systems - or hard coded html - myself - if you're use is almost totally blogging - it should be a good solution.

    Would certainly advise looking into using Akismet for spam prevention however!

  8. #8
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    Re: Website / Blogging

    Well, I've never used any CMS and I was simply under the impression that it adds complexity that is overkill for my needs. Saying that, I am kinda surprised that it is taking so much effort to set things up the way I want it. I've got two questions:

    1. By default, it seems that WordPress redirect a logged-in user to the dashboard. It might make sense when it's me, the admin, but how can I redirect a user exactly back to the page s/he logged from?

    2. This one is for anyone familiar with WordPress / PHP with a bit of spare time. I've installed a plug-in called "Members" for the sole purpose of being able to hide contents from posts according to users. The plug-in comes with a shortcode called [access] which does almost what I need. It takes a parameter called "role", and if the logged-in user matches the role, then content within a post can be displayed. So I can transparently hide contents within a post (as opposed to having entire posts private). The problem is, the shortcode can only take one role at the moment. This leads to the odd scenario where if I set a content to be only viewable by "friends" (custom role), I, as the "administrator" can not view the content (without logging into a dummy "friend" account). I had a peek at the code, it the author has stated that multi-roles will be implemented in the future. But that was a year and a half ago, and it looks like his latest version of the plug-in is only available through his own site, for members who are paying for support. Since I do not know if he intends to publicly release the new plugin, I've decided to do a lame edit to his code:

    Code:
    /**
     * Provide/restrict access to specific roles or capabilities. This content should
     * not be shown in feeds.
     *
     * @todo Allow multiple roles and capabilities to be input (comma-separated).
     *
     * Content should be wrapped like [access role="editor"]This is content.[/access].
     *
     * @since 0.1
     * @uses current_user_can() Checks if the current user has the role or capability.
     * @uses is_feed() Checks if we're currently viewing a feed.
     * @param $attr array The shortcode attributes.
     * @param $content string The content that should be shown/restricted.
     * @return $content string The content if it should be shown.  Else, return nothing.
     */
    
    function members_access_check_shortcode( $attr, $content = null ) {
    
    	/* Set up the default attributes. */
    	$defaults = array(
    		'capability' => '',
    		'role' => '',
    		'feed' => false,
    	);
    
    	/* Merge the input attributes and the defaults. */
    	extract( shortcode_atts( $defaults, $attr ) );
    
    	/* If the current user has the input capability, show the content. */
    	if ( $capability && current_user_can( $capability ) )
    		return $content;
    	
    	/* If the current user is admin */
    	elseif ( current_user_can( 'administrator') )
    		return $content;
    
    	/* If the current user has the input role, show the content. */
    	elseif ( $role && current_user_can( $role ) )
    		return $content;
    
    	/* If $feed was set to true and we're currently displaying a feed, show the content. */
    	elseif ( $feed && 'false' !== $feed && is_feed() )
    		return $content;
    
    	/* If there is no content, return nothing. */
    	elseif ( !is_null( $content ) )
    		return '';
    
    	/* Return nothing if none of the conditions have been met. */
    	return '';
    }
    Bits in bold is what I've added. Dirty fix for what I'd like now, but inadequate if I ever find myself in a situation where I'd like to have contents for "friends" and "family". For that, I'd have to implement what the author said he would do, notably comma separated input for multiple roles / capabilities.

    I have a vague idea of how I might try to solve this, but I'll need to figure out how strings work in PHP and I am not confident that I won't break something. Is this something anyone here might be able to do quite easily?

  9. #9
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    Re: Website / Blogging

    You can set Wordpress up in a number of ways. Users don't have to be logged in to post a comment, but if you want other people to be editors or authors of content, then they have to log in and will get the privileges that you, the admin, set up for them. Comments themselves can be controlled, and there are some useful plugins that allow you to control comments and spam.

    If you are going to self host, you can protect thre site with Apache's access methods, giving users a password that they need to enter before they get as far as the Wordpress front end, but I guess that isn't really what you want to do.

    So - Simple set up - one Wordpress installation, one Author/Editor/Admin (you) who posts content. Comments are allowed from anyone but they need to supply some credentials, and you might want to moderate the first post of any new person adding a comment (which WP allows you to do) Successive comments from that (approved) person are published immediately.

    If you want to add more authors or editors, create accounts for them. They can then write content, which others can comment on.

    You can self host on a Linux box (or set up a trial internal site just for your own use) using MySQL, PHP and Apache (and the Wordpress software of course) or if you use windows, get WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) as an integrated (open source) package and put the WP software on that, either to host or just to play around with configuration or whatever.

    Of course, once you have a working LAMP or WAMP setup, you can try Drupal or Joomla.

    (And I have moved this to a more appropriate place in the forums)
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  10. #10
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    Re: Website / Blogging

    Drupal does have a pretty flexible multi-site capability I'm testing at the moment - in theory you could perhaps set up a separate sub domain for each major subject .. that may be overkill though.

    Get a local XAMPP set up - download a few systems and play with them... thats the best advice I could give.

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