Multiple blogs are a reality surely?

That’s kind of the swing I had on the ball. I used multiple blogs on MT for various functions – main blog, photo blog, math notes, etc.
When I switched over to WP I was able to coalesce all of my various blogs into a category scheme, and run one blog. Which is swank for administration.
Now the biggest drawback for me is that they all feed off of the same index.php, and I have yet to figure out how to significantly customize/duplicate or otherwise modify the index.php files to give me the special functions and appearances these ‘sub blogs’ need.
Any ideas floating about?

@scott –
Yes, you can add a wrappering DIV around the main area of index.php, but have its ID (or class) be programmatically generated. That is, if you’re in a single-category page, wrapper the content section (or the innards of body) with a div with the current category number or name.
Then, in the CSS file, you can customize/tweak based on the wrappering DIV ID. I use a similar technique so that posts of different cat/type have slightly different styling, and so that multi-post pages and single-post pages are laid out a bit differently.
-d
CHAITGEAR

You don’t need a wrapper div for that – you can always put a class or ID on the body tag itself.

As I understand it, the issue of multiple blogs has as much to do with whether you are able to separate categories of content physically on your site as it does the user permissions that allow you to add things to individual categories.
In WordPress, you can’t prevent (to my knowledge) a user that can normally post from posting to any category.
It’s also of note that WordPress makes it distinctly difficult to separate content from different categories on the same page, due to the way The Loop is used with querystring information. When I say difficult, I mean that when you want to do something with WP that is outside the logic originally imagined for The Loop, you are forced to code it by hand.
Presumably, all of this could be done in WP with a variety of hacks, work-arounds, and plugins, but it just doesn’t currently accomplish multi-blog. I doubt that this is an absolute necessity for the average blog user, but I think that a few better-planned functions for retrieving category posts coupled with solid ACL-level security on categories might improve WordPress significantly enough to call it “multi-blog capable”.

I think someone ought to intercede and say something about the upgrade path
planned by the devs. They have already said we will go down that route when we are ready. In the meantime a single install of WP works beautifully anyway.
If you multiply a heap of junk you just get more junk. The architecture of MT has been putting people off for ages. Its much vaunted multiple blog capacity is IMHO overrated anyway.

Where can one read the of the upgrade path intended by the devs?
I’ve been looking around here for some official words, not just on what will eventually become a feature, but how they intend to make that happen.
So, forgive me if I sound a little snide when I say that I’d rather see a dev intercede on his own behalf and start dishing on the planning for this feature. How do they intend to make it work when they do make it work? If you can point me in the right direction for finding this info, that would be cool, too. I would be interested in learning about any intended updates for WordPress 1.3, 2.0…

The devs thank heavens are not in the marketting department of some very big software company. They are private citizens developing open source software. They will tell us when they are ready but any careful reading will elicit a lot of clues. But they do not owe you or I anything at all. My choice to use software is based on what it does now. If I want virtual software I will wait for the new OS from the company . (I can not bring myself to give them free publicity by writing their name ). And while you say that the devs might want to intercede on their own behalf the lead developer on this project is probably the most competent web programmer on the planet. He is also very reticent and modest by nature as far as I can see. If you want Word Press “developing” why not branch and write your own? We will give a test run willingly.

Will multiple installs overwrite the tables in the database?

Wow.. well that was very informative.
So basically the only thing that is missing atm is user posting restrictions and you’ve got the aproximate same thing going on?
Sounds like a plugin would fix that perfectly.
Anyone have any idea how that would work/be implemented? I’d be happy to play around with it as an idea, I’m pretty handy in php, just haven’t looked into WP’s backend much. Would be nice to get a heads up or some ideas.

You already have user posting restrictions if you do multiple installs. But depending on the implementation, you could end up with duplicate tables of users, or even multiple sets of the code installed in different directories. That’s not as pretty as it could be.
A better way might be to make the config file dynamic so that it updates the appropriate (non-user) table names when you switch blogs. But then you would need to add a table to house the user permissions for accessing the different prefixes, and an administrative interface for setting these privileges.

Well yes, my point was how to do it WITHOUT multiple installs.

Um, has anyone here actually used MT?
The ‘multiple blog’ feature is pretty literally that – it’s not just a mangling of category usage. Each blog has it’s own config, users/permissions, templates, and so forth.
For a single user it may not be a big deal, but in a school or business environment it’s a great help. And that’s even considering it has pretty weak user/perms management overall. It would be a great thing to have in WP but if the infrastructure’s not there, it’s not there (yet?).
So while it may be possible to simulate it, that’s not the same thing, esp for the majority of people who aren’t going to hack PHP to make it happen.

I’ve used MT, found it slow and clunky, moved on. Didn’t like it much.
I know the multiple blog feature is useful for business, but my point was more aimed at the majority of users, ie personal users, that use blog software.
Basically my point was that if two plugins (one being user posting permissions) were implemented.. then you’d have the same basic function that most people used that for on MT.
Mulitple installs are a future development feature of WP, so I wasn’t suggesting we try to replace them, just a way to quel concerns from people who currently use MT and are thinking of switching.

> <i>I know the multiple blog feature is useful for business, but my point was more aimed at the majority of users, ie personal users, that use blog software.</i>
I disagree that business is the only benefactor of multiple blogs.
I develop websites for a variety of charities, often, they need a separate blog for a special event or emphasis.
I know and have seen more than one individual, such as Mark Pilgrim who publishes free online books, seminars and/or lectures on a particular topic, such as Dive into Accessibility.
I myself have used multiple blogs, one to keep photos, the other to keep posts separate. Similarly, I’ve spawned off individual blogs to create subdomains that cover a singular topic outside of my daily droning.
Anyway, that’s my thought/need on the topic.

As far as I can see after scraping through the code (and experimenting on building my own CMS / multi-blogs, there’d need to be a user / blog / permission table or two, associating which users can to what to each tables. This would be similar to the was unix accounts work with their “groups”.
While not impossible, it’d also mean every post / view / lookup / whatever would need to check this table to see if the logged on user (or anonymous person) has sufficient permissions to allow that action.
Eg: anonymous users could view, but not post or reply to category x, but can view, reply and post to category y (perhaps a guestbook category?).
While there are lots of possibilities, there are lots of things that would need to be re-written to accomplish these tasks (read: not available ’til version 2.0). While I would love to have access to these features, I understand that they would require a _great_ ammount of effort to implement.