Author’s Note: My apologies - I accidentally deleted this entry while working on chapter 17.  I was able to retrieve the article text from my rss feed, but lost all the original comments.

Yes, finally, I’m back with another chapter in the Building an ExpressionEngine Site series.  It’s been a couple of weeks since our last installment - but with the holidays plus negotiating for my new job with EllisLab and other projects going on, this one took awhile.  Also - and this is a good heads up for those of you new to implementing sites on EE, weblogs will always take longer than other sections of the site.  Why?  Simply because they require more work - more templates and more formatting. 

However, as always with EE, there are a number of ways to implement a weblog with EE.  Let me explain at a high level the approach I’m taking here and you can decide if it meets your needs or not. 

Weblog Implementation Overview
Most weblogs will require a number of templates - however, depending on your requirements and expectations of traffic to a weblog you can make some choices that will save you some time and trouble on the front end.

Weblogs being, well, weblogs, they usually have the following needs:

• An index template that comes up by default, and shows the last x number of posts with the newest at the top.  If there are longer posts, often this template only shows part of the post and has a “read more” link of some sort, which leads to the…
• Single-view template that shows an entire post
• Comments template where users can respond
• Permalink template which places this post at a specific URL that won’t change as new content gets added to the weblog
• Category Index - if the weblog posts are categorized, this view shows the latest posts assigned to the desired category
• Archive - most often this is broken down by month
• RSS or Atom feed

Quite a list. 

However - especially for weblogs like we’re building that are part of a business site (rather than really being the entire site) we can repurpose one template to serve multiple needs.  In this tutorial we’ll accomplish the weblog implementation with three main templates and a few new embedded templates.  The three main templates will be:

• Weblog Index.  This will serve as the default index view, the category view and the archive view
• Weblog Comments.  This will serve as the single-view, comments, and permalink template.
• RSS feed.

Working Model
Here’s a link to the working model weblog that this tutorial covers: http://www.boyink.com/splaat/building_series/chapter_16_weblog/.  Play around with it, and note where all the links go.

If your blog is busier, has deep archives, or you want a different category view, you might consider dedicated templates for those purposes.  I prefer to start simple so for most clients just getting into blogs will start with this approach and modify it later based on actual need. 

Onto the build!

Create Data Structures
To begin, you’ll first need to get the EE data structures in place.  You’ll need:

• A new weblog.  In my case and in all the sample templates I’ll be providing this is called “bees_weblog”.  Make sure commenting is enabled.
• A fieldset.  I’m using the default field set that installs with EE so will have fields of body, summary, and extended.
• A category group.  I created a weblog-specific category group called “bees_weblog” with categories of Company News, Industry News, and Ramblings.  I entered short descriptions for each.
• Remember to assign the new category group and field group to the new weblog.

Do Some Data Entry
Go ahead and make some entries in your new weblog - at least one per category.  Make sure to use all the fields so you’ll know if your templates function correctly.  Oh - and also post a new section heading type thing into your miscellaneous_content weblog.  Make sure it has a url_title of “weblog”.

Load the New Main Templates
Here are the new templates you’ll need.  Let’s get these and the new embedded templates loaded up and working, then I’ll go through and hit the highlights.  I’ve done a bit of higher-level coding in these both to save you some time tweaking them and to demonstrate the use of EE variables.  Here are the three main templates.  These should go in the same template group as the other main templates in your site:

• Weblog Index (saved as chapter_16_weblog in my example site): chapter_16_weblog.txt
• Weblog Comments (saved as chapter_16_comments in my example site):chapter_16_comments.txt
• RSS (saved as rss_2 in my example site). Note that this feed has been modified so that it will display HTML. rss_2.txt

RSS Template
Make sure when you create the new template for the RSS feed, you choose “RSS Page” in the “Template Type” drop-down.  If you forget while creating the template, just click the “preferences” link for the template group you put it in, and change it there.

Load the New Embedded Templates
The weblog index and weblog comments template share some right-column elements, so I’ve pulled these out and saved them as embedded templates.  Here are the ones you’ll need.  Save them into the template group holding the rest of your embedded templates:

• Weblog Categories (saved as weblog_categories): chapter_16_weblog_categories.txt
• Weblog Monthly Archives (saved as monthly_archives):chapter_16_monthly_archives.txt
• RSS link (saved as syndicate_block):chapter_16_syndicate_block.txt
• Comments form (more on why I embed this later) saved as weblog_entry_comments:chapter_16_weblog_entry_comments.txt

Grab the Updated Stylesheet
We’ve several new content types now, and I had to create entries in the stylesheet for them.  Make sure to grab the latest version: http://www.boyink.com/splaat?building_series/stylesheet/

Update Main Navigation
Remember to update the embedded template that contains your main navigation.  Mine now looks like this:

Specifying Names with Global Variables
OK, with those new templates loaded you’ll need to make and name or pathing changes required for using them in your environment.  If you’ve been following along with this series, you’ll have done this several times, changing the code of the embeds to reflect the name of your specific template group holding your embedded templates.

But don’t do that yet.  I’ve made this easier, and want to explain how.  First open the weblog_index template.  See where it has the following code:

What’s that all about?

These are Dynamically Assigned Global Variables, although don’t let the “Global” world fool you.  Like the docs state: “Variables created this way are available for use anywhere within that template.”

Essentially you can think of these as “text-replacement” variables.  As EE parses the template, it will store the text you specify in the “assign_variable” statement, and then anywhere it runs into that variable name in the rest of the code template, EE will swap out the variable name for the text.  For example, we’ve specified “building_series_ch16_embeds” as the value for “my_embedded_template_group”.  Later in the template, when EE finds:

EE will substitute the text we specified and see that line of code as:

Got it?

Cool.

Why did I use them?  Two reasons:

• First, to make it easier for you to move these templates into your environment.  Rather than having to edit several lines of code, now you can just make the change in one spot and the rest of the template will use that updated variable value.
• To get you thinking about more advanced coding methods like this.  Depending on your specific EE project, using things like Global Variables can make it easier to get your work done by centralizing templates that do the same thing but for different areas of your site.

So - take a moment now and edit the values of those variables in both the chapter_16_weblog and chapter_16_comments templates where appropriate. Once saved, the templates should load and function properly.

Building Links Using a Combination of Variables
With the global variables in place, now it’s possible to build links using a combination of true Global Variables, template Global Variables, and content from a weblog entry.  Consider this link:

Passing Global Variables to Embedded Templates
OK, take a deep breath.  This will be the most complex part of this chapter, and possibly this entire tutorial series. Go do some carbo-loading if need be.  Ready?  OK. 

Here’s the situation.  The parent weblog index and weblog comments templates know some things that the embedded templates also need to know.  The embedded templates are building the navigation to the category and archive views of our weblog, which will use the index template for presentation.  The parent templates know the name of the weblog needed, the name of the index template and what template group it’s in, because we’ve specified those items as global variables.  But we have two embedded templates that will also need that information. 

What to do?  Well, we could just copy our “assign_variable” code from the parent templates to the embedded templates.  But that’s not very elegant, and increases the number of places to make edits if those values change.

The other alternative is to combine Global Variables with Embed variables.  This way, the variable is specified in the parent template, then passed into the embedded template for use there. 

Now just stop and think about this for a minute.  What we’ll end up with is an embedded template that builds, for example, links to weblog categories.  But the weblog name of where the categories come from along with the location of the templates it needs to link to are variables.  What’s this mean?  You now have a little “category-link-builder” that you could re-use across different parts of a site, even when the weblog is different or the templates it’s linking to is different.  I’ve used this approach here on Boyink.com—I have four main weblogs (the business blog, Jeep, Bantam, and Photos).  On each of them I wanted category navigation for the bottom of the page. With this approach I have one embedded template that builds that category nav, and I just send it the necessary weblog name, and template names it needs to link to.  Then, for example, when I wanted to pull category descriptions in addition to the category name, all I had to do was edit that one embedded template’s code, and voila - all four weblogs instantly see the update.

So how to do this?  The trick to remember is that in order to pass a Global Variable to an embedded template you have to change it’s name on the way.  For example, in our weblog index template we have:

While passing it to the embedded template (category navigation builder), the variable gets its name changed to “the_weblog”:

Then in the embedded template, the new name is used:

Also note that formatting with quotes etc. is very picky and particular while doing this.

OK- breathe easy. The hardest part is over.

Again, to summarize, with these templates you should be able to load them up, edit the global variables to reflect what you’ve named both the templates and your template groups (make sure to edit both the weblog_index and weblog_comments) and once saved, the weblog should function.

The Comments Form
Let’s take a look at the comments form now.  You might be wondering why, since I have only one weblog single view/permalink/comments template why I choose to embed the part of the page that actually displays the comments (the embedded template called “weblog_entry_comments").  Mainly it makes the parent comments template a bit shorter/cleaner, and it sets you up well for use with multiple weblogs.  Ever since building Boyink.com in this fashion - where I wanted to have a centralized comments form for use by four different weblogs - I’ve been doing it this way.  Comments are a bit of a pain to layout and style, so only doing it once for multiple weblogs is a nice way to go.

Lesse...what else is there with this Chapter.  Oh yea…

Highlighted Category Nav
Just for fun I used URL Segments along with conditionals to apply an active class to the currently viewed category.  You can see it action here.

Let’s look at that code:

All this does is compare the 4th url segment (which displays the category url title for the currently viewed category) to the category_url_title of each category returned by the weblog:categories tag.  When the condition is true, the class of “active_cat” is applied to that category name.  If your URL structure is different you may need to change what segment the code looks at.

Also - I’ve used another conditional to display an “All News Items” link under the category list.  This will only display of a category has been choosen.  Not a big deal - it just flags the user that they are looking at a category view and provides a link that’s a bit more clear than remembering to click the “weblog” main navigation item.

Monthly Archives
Aside from our trickery with the variables, the archive links are built using a straightforward implementation of the weblog:month_links tag.

RSS Template
The RSS template is also a straightforward copy/tweak of the template that EE installs with.  As mentioned above I did make the changes required for it to display HTML.

Zzzzzzzz
Still with me?  My eyes are bugging out a bit reading this.  I have a feeling I may need to re-visit this chapter, but since it’s been a while and since this is such a big chapter I’m going to put it live.  You can let me know in the comments if there’s something I didn’t explain clearly or if the templates didn’t load and work as expected.

Next up - barring the need to re-vamp this chapter - I’ll work on the Contact Us page.  That should be really quick and easy compared to this one.  Past that all we’ve got is the Search and Search results to get going.

Back to Chapter 15.
On to Chapter 17.