I’m still designing on this “individual archive” problem. To recap, I want:
- each individual posting should have its own page
- different categoried postings will have different look and feels
- the “link” postings, posts which are just a URL, will either have a very minimal page or (preferably) not be archived at all.
I think I have a few more ideas on implementation options.
- Stylesheet reference and inclusion is in the HTML of the header, which is generated by MT… could use this to specify a particular CSS file based on the name of the posting category. So for example, every individual posting archive page would have a stylesheet for most of the style, and also another which specifies categroy-specific layout styling.
- For the actual formatting of different categories, we could have just the raw information from the entry (e.g. MTEntry, MTExtended, MTExcerpt, the date etc), each field in its own named DIV. Then have a serious CSS to determine the entire layout of the page, generating HTML…
- OR could instead just list all the code for every type of entry, and then specify in the CSS which ones are visible- just like the Amazon list on the right margin here. So for example there could be a thing which formats the Link postings into
here’s a link I was looking at today:
<a href=”<$MTExcerpt$>”><$MTTitle$></a>which only is visible if the posting is in the Link category.
- Another option: the
MTMacro plugin. You could use this to generate blocks of code based on the category. Used in conjunction with one of the above, this would be the nicest on the user end, since not all of the code would appear in every single page… However the complexity goes totally crazy and I would have yet another technology to debug on my site. I dunno, it’s a possibility. - To continue on the previous article about this, I found a tweak someone implemented where he made .htaccess redirects in certain directories. I could make a template for that, and list redirects for all the articles that are not in the proper location (like an individual posting in category A which has been generated with style B and is thus in directory B). This would complete the plan where we generate all articles in all styles and ignore (link around) the ones that don’t match.