Dealing With News Content On A Site

[webgyrl]

Hey gang,

 

I was wondering if anyone can tell me how this site:

www.adamaworld.com

was able to get their news parsed with that [Full Story] link going to it's own page within the design (/news/entry?id=2)

 

Is this a script or something that I need to install?

 

I'd love to be able to do this on a new design I am working on.

 

If you know how to do this, can you please PM me or leave me links to info.

 

Thanks

[TCH-Bruce]

Well that's a standard feature of most blogging software. What you see on the main page is an exceprt of the story and the link [full story] takes you to the individual post.

[webgyrl]

Bruce,

 

How do you install this blog type thing within an existing web site? I thought a blog was a straight blog? How do you just use bits of a blog type interface wherever you want them? If you look at the rest of the site, it's just regular XHTML/CSS pages. Only the news bits on the home page and the actual news articles use this blog type feature.

 

I'd love to know how to do this!

 

Sorry for totally not expressing myself well on this subject! LOL

[TCH-Bruce]

I don't know that you can. But blogs can be created to look exactly like the site you linked too. Or other content management systems can do the same thing.

 

If you are dealing with static HTML pages it will be a lot of work but with PHP and MySQL which most CMS and blog software are written in it's easier since the content is dynamic. You create templates and use PHP to make the SQL calls to a database to display content.

[TCH-Bruce]

Also, when a blog or cms send a page to the browser it looks like a static page (view source) but the content was created on the fly from a database.

[DWD]

For what it's worth, I've got a blog front end with a regular old html site behind or along with it. My front page www.danzfamily.com is the blog, but if you look at the navigation in the upper left it will lead you to the rest of my site which are just html pages. I had the regular website first and then installed a blog which took over my prior front end index page. The two (blog and non-blog) are easily mixed.

[webgyrl]

For what it's worth, I've got a blog front end with a regular old html site behind or along with it. My front page www.danzfamily.com is the blog, but if you look at the navigation in the upper left it will lead you to the rest of my site which are just html pages. I had the regular website first and then installed a blog which took over my prior front end index page. The two (blog and non-blog) are easily mixed.

 

DWD,

 

Thanks for linking to your site. That is the sort of thing I would like to do.

 

Are you using CSS DIV tags to include your navigation? I didn't look at the code to see how the layout is set up.

 

I see you use Movable Type. How easy was that to install and use. I am considering using that but I also found another CMS called Nucleus CMS nucleuscms.org. I may look into that one since it is free to use even for commercial sites.

 

I am still looking in to how to accomplish the kind of design I referenced above. I really think I am going to have to forego a table layout and learn DIV Tags once and for all!

 

Thanks for all the input Bruce and DWD.

 

Would I contact Tech support to find out if I am allowed to install Nucleus CMS on TCH servers?

[TCH-Bruce]

From looking at what's needed to run Nucleus it should run fine here at TCH.

 

Their installation instructions even include screen shots of how to create the MySQL database in cPanel before installation.

[DWD]

Are you using CSS DIV tags to include your navigation? I didn't look at the code to see how the layout is set up.

Since I don't know what a "CSS DIV tag" is, I'm going to say no. I just html'd the links into my index template in Movable Type.

 

 

I see you use Movable Type. How easy was that to install and use.

I occupy a strange place in the tech spectrum. Among non-tech people I am a tech-God. Among tech people, I am tech-weenie. After reading the MT manual, I decided installation was too much for me and I paid to have my site blog installed. (I had already done the rest of my site myself.) However, this should not reflect poorly on MT. It is not easy to install, but that goes hand-in-hand with the fact that I believe it is the most feature rich/flexible/powerful, best blog software available. And, while possibly not easy to install/configure, it is very easy to use. Once installed, I just started using it without reading the manual. It is very intuitive.

 

Good luck.