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January 10, 2003
Nested Blogs
Here's a thought I had today: Nested Blogs (aka Blogs within Blogs).
I am beginning to put together a website for my gaming group (it's in a temporary location until we decide on a domain name). I plan on having one main blog for the group, to which everyone will have access, and one blog for each game that we're playing, with access given to the guys that are playing it. I suppose I could create categories for each game, but they really deserve their own blog.
I think it would be a wonderful thing to have all of those game blogs be contained within the main blog. When created, they could inhert it configuration from the Main Blog, so if any changes were made to it, they would be reflected on the Game Blogs. I could authorize users to create a blog within the Main Blog, but not system-wide. The core template tags (MTEntries, MTComments, etc.) in the Main Blog would default to including content from all the blogs contained within the Main Blog. The idea there is that, even though I could use some combination of MTOtherBlog and MTWholeSystem/GlobalListings), it would be a really tedious operation to change all the templates whenever I add or remove a Game Blog.
I imagine there's many more benefits to doing this, but I haven't been able to think of any others just yet. ;)
Posted by rayners at January 10, 2003 02:24 PM
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Comments
That's not exactly what I meant. I was thinking more along the lines of within the Main Blog, it could be considered almost an entire blogging system of its own, with author accounts, new blogs, and so on. And posts to any of these sub-blogs (what I called Game Blogs) would be treated like categories are right now. When you post to a specific category right now, it will show up in the Main Blog's index page, which is what you should expect would happen unless you edited the template to do otherwise. That's what I would like to see with these Game Blogs. Posts to those blogs should appear in the Main Blog's index page unless the index template is edited specifically to not display posts from that blog.
Posted by: David Raynes at January 10, 2003 09:41 PM
From a brief look at MTWholeSystem, I think that'd work fine. Write an index page template that uses MTWholeSystem instead of MTEntries, then add it as an index template with the same central URL (like ../index.html, if MT doesn't mind that) for every subblog (so it gets republished whenever any subblog updates).
Posted by: Mark Paschal at January 11, 2003 08:10 PM
That's a really grand idea. In my present redesign of my site (which presently resides only on my local harddisk while the bugs are ironed out), I've decided to transfer some content that I was updating manually (a list of links sorted by category) into a blog, but I want it to inherit most of the look and feel of the main site, so as to appear to be a seamless part of the main site. Needless to say, if the main design changes, then I need to go hunt through my links blog and make changes, and then go to my book reviews blog and do the same... it would be really nice the two sub-blogs could inherit their properties from the main blog... :-)
Posted by: lashlar at January 25, 2003 06:03 PM
Hindsite from the humidors - What happened to the gaming group site?
Posted by: humidors at May 2, 2004 01:51 PM
Take a look at www.boingboing.net. They have a nested "guestblogger" feature.
Posted by: Clay Shirky at January 10, 2003 09:11 PM