David Raynes

MultiBlogInclude

A tag I hope will be useful for sites that end up splitting into multiple blogs (like mine, for example). MTMultiBlogInclude will allow template developers to include a template from another blog easily, in addition to giving them an easy way to do local customizations for the current blog. The current blog is checked for a template with the given name first, followed by the default blog given in the tag.

For example:

<MTMultiBlogInclude default_blog="2" module="Header">

In that example, the plugin would first check the current blog for a template module named "Header" and if none is found, it will then check the blog with id 2 for it.

MultiBlogLocalBlog

A tag that came to me as I was working on MultiBlogInclude. With this container tag, you can switch blog contexts to the current blog that is being built instead of the blog in which whatever template or item (entry, category, etc.) is currently being built resides.

For example (in the "Header" module above in blog id 2):

<MTBlogName>
<MTMultiBlogLocalBlog><MTBlogName></MTMultiBlogLocalBlog>

In that example (in the blog with id 2), first the name of the blog with id 2 would be displayed, followed by the name of the blog that orginally used MultiBlogInclude. This could also be useful with MultiBlogEntries or any of the other multiple blog listing tags MultiBlog makes available.

MultiBlogBlogHeader / MultiBlogBlogFooter

These tags have been a long time coming. I know there has been more than one person to come up with some kind of fancy template or PHP code to work around this glaring omission from MultiBlog, but version 2.0 will solve that once and for all. Similar to other header/footer tag combinations, these tags will allow users to add in template code before the first item from a blog and after the last.

Now for a complicated example. For this example, we are building the main blog with blog id 10, along with a link blog whose blog id is 12. We want the links to appear as a list between entries.

<MTMultiBlogEntries include_blogs="10,12" lastn="30">
<MTMultiBlogBlogHeader>
<MTMultiBlogIfNotLocalBlog><ul></MTMultiBlogIfNotLocalBlog>
</MTMultiBlogBlogHeader>


<MTMultiBlogIfLocalBlog>Normal Entry: <MTEntryTItle>....</MTMultiBlogIfLocalBlog>
<MTMultiBlogIfNotLocalBlog><li><a href="<MTEntryMore>"><MTEntryTitle></a></li></MTMultiBlogIfNotLocalBlog>


<MTMultiBlogBlogFooter>
<MTMultiBlogIfNotLocalBlog></ul></MTMultiBlogIfNotLocalBlog>
</MTMultiBlogBlogFooter>
</MTMultiBlogEntries>