Forums / Cotonti / Extensions / Tutorial: A home away from home, building a blogging site - Part 1 of 3

Do you have a requirement like I did where I wanted the homepage to be kept separate from lets say my blogs page?.

This article is my first in a line of several how-to's and will show you how with NO CODING EXPERIENCE you can make a blogs section and associated plugins a working reality. Over the next 3 days I will show you how to create a simple, effective and robust blogging solution using the power of Cotonti's scalable architecture.

Experience Level
Beginner - No coding experience necessary

Demo
Click here to view

Features

• Home-page style design.
• Blogs listing.
• Recent blogs

Step 1: The Groundwork

The Blogs framework is based on the News and RecentItems plugins. (Copyright its respective authors).

• Open your Plugins/ folder and copy the News and RecentItems plugins.
• Paste the two copied folders into a new folder called BlogsFramework and rename them to Blogs and RecentBlogs respectively.
• Open each item in each folder and rename them accordingly. EG: news.php becomes blogs.php

Step 2: Initial setup

• Rename the blogs.php file to blogs.list.php


• Open the file in your favourite editor and find this section

/* ====================
[BEGIN_SED_EXTPLUGIN]
Code=news
Part=homepage
File=news
Hooks=index.tags
Tags=index.tpl:{INDEX_NEWS}
Order=10
[END_SED_EXTPLUGIN]
==================== */


Replace it with



/* ====================
[BEGIN_SED_EXTPLUGIN]
Code=blogs
Part=lists
File=blogs.list
Hooks=list.tags
Tags=list.blogs.tpl:{LIST_BLOGS}
Order=10
[END_SED_EXTPLUGIN]
==================== */



• Bring up a find/replace window (usually CTRL + R) and replace all occurences of the word 'news' with 'blogs' and all occurences of the word 'INDEX_' with the word 'LIST_'
• Save the file


• Open the blogs.setup.php file in your favourite editor and find this section

/* ====================
[BEGIN_SED_EXTPLUGIN]
Code=news
Name=News


Replace it with



/* ====================
[BEGIN_SED_EXTPLUGIN]
Code=blogs
Name=Blogs



• Save the file

Step 3: Coming Soon.