I am working on a project that requires a CNN like article structure, where there are main articles (published in a magazine ‘volume/issue’) and authors’ blogs separate. The idea is to have official articles (gone through a rigorous editorial process) while allowing each individual author to make shorter, less significant blog posts. Both the main articles and the blog posts need to be associated with the author who wrote it.
EDIT: So imagine a menu that looked something like the following…
- Home
- Categories (for the main articles)
- Cat one
- Cat two
- Cat n+1
- Archives (for the main articles)
- Volume n
- Issue n
- Issue n+1
- Volume n+1
- …
- Volume n
- Blogs
- Author one
- Author two
- Author n+1
- About
I’ve been working with WordPress for a few years now, and I would love to adapt it to this model.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Would the solution be in custom taxonomies? Custom post types?
Summary of Requirements:
- Individual Author Blogs
- Main Published Articles
That is the perfect use case for a multi-site setup. Users are shared, so your authors donât need more than one account, and you can activate plugins on a per site basis.
An example: For the main blog youâll need something like Edit Flow. On the author blogs this would just get in their way. It is also easier to handle theme variations with child themes for each blog in multi-site.
However, a shared media library for all blogs will be rather difficult.
Taxonomies (like categories) are not made for your case: Each post may be associated with multiple terms, and it is rather difficult to force authors to use just one. Setting up proper permalinks requires some tricky extra work too.
There’s several ways to do this. One would be using multisite and giving each author their own site. Then feature articles on the main site.
Another would be to use categories or tags. You could assign a “featured” tag to articles you want to showcase, then build custom page templates to display only articles with those tags.