Multiple Blogs

kienzan

This discussion is related to the NillaBlog addon.

Hey, can I convert many categories to blogs?

ddumont

It's definitely possible. It would be a pretty minor change to the plugin.

ddumont

Can you post an enhancement request issue on the project page? Or if you are feeling adventurous, submit a patch?

tester13

May be add checkbox to category edit screen?
I also want to see AllowDiscussions settings (as we have field in table for this already).
And we need to change Vanilla handing of AllowDiscussions (today it just completely hides category). I just want it to be visible, but represented in other style in all lists, and without any link, just text, plus, of course it must be impossible to select it in dropdown list.

ddumont

@tester13 I've been planning on changing config so that you can just select from the list of defined categories instead of having to try to discover what id to use.

But what do you mean about AllowDiscussions? How do you want that to integrate with the NillaBlog? I don't know if NillaBlog is the best place to modify the behavior of that feature...

tester13

Considering multiple Blogs having parent category where users are not allowed to post is very useful. :-)
As for AllowDiscussions - we need to change core anyway. Plus add checkbox for category (same as for your plugin will do to convert category to blog later).

ddumont

@tester13 Ok well it sounds like that's a problem the permissions system needs to fix.

ddumont

The changes for this are live on my site and have been committed to the open source project. I'm waiting for the next release of Vanilla before uploading a new version here. There are changes in the next Vanilla that they pulled from me so that I could do what I needed to do.

tester13

@ddumont What changes you mean?
As I understand, unstable branch already have your fixes to core merged?
So, may be it'll be possible to upload AddIn to your own site?

ddumont

Yes if you take unstable vanilla and it has my changes, using the latest from my project should be fine.

crmarks

@ddumont, do you think it would be possible to run multiple instances of the NillaBlog plugin? I want to turn a second category into a 'blog' but utilize a vastly different stylesheet than my first blog.

Thanks for your help, the plugin has been a great asset!

ddumont

@crmarks Hmm... No there's no way to specify what css classes should be used for each category.

I could try to also insert a "NillaBlog#" css class where # is the discussion number and you can hand tailor your css to key off of that if you like? Does that sound like it will solve your issue? So some top level element would have

class=" ... NillaBlog NillaBlog5"

for example.

crmarks

@ddumont If you think that's the easiest way to implement it, I can't see why that wouldn't work. If I understand correctly, I could simply add overriding CSS classes using NillaBlog# where # is the category #?

I was thinking I'd have to duplicate the plugin somehow and customize the code, but CSS should be enough. Basically I'm looking to set aside a forum category as an articles section, and want a view similar to the Blog, but styled a bit different.

ddumont

Yes, and you could do that for any category marked as a blog. I'll look into it.

ddumont

@crmarks

Try this: http://code.google.com/p/nillablog/source/browse/class.nillablog.plugin.php
and let me know how far you get. Put a link here when it's all working so I can see what you did too!

crmarks

Thanks so much! I'll try it out soon and report back!