Ideas and Suggestions needed....

PhilCorleyPhoto

I am perserving to try and recreate my blog in SM and slowly getting there (thanks to a number of people here).

Now, want I want to do is to categorise my blog entries; for example - News, Ramblings, Kit, Locations, etc.

On my blog page (https://philcorley.smugmug.com/Blog), I want to be able to have a list in the right-hand margin that shows these categories (ideally with the number of items) and when clicked, the Blog will filter to just those items.

Anyone any ideas if this can be done?

I know WordPress will do this, but I am trying to avoid that as what just one site and I need the site style to be the same; and whilst i can take photos, my web-design skills I far too lacking for that challenge

Thanks

Phil

denisegoldberg

The only thing I can think of is creating a set of folders within your blog to represent your categories, placing each blog entry in the folder for the category. You could build a menu content element that contains links to the categories / folders. One problem with this is that you will lose the top level without categories unless you build a separate page containing an entry for each of the blog posts. SmugMug is an awesome platform for sharing your photos but it does not have the structure that you have in your current blog.

I guess I don't understand why it would be a problem to maintain your blog in Wordpress and your photos in SmugMug. You can have one be a subdomain so it would appear that a single URL gets to both sites.

If you'd like to see an example of a site that uses both SmugMug and Wordpress (and that doesn't fully match the look & feel of the sites), take a look at @leftquark 's site. You can access his blog from the BIO/NEWS menu entry on his site at http://www.aaronmphotography.com/. The blog, at http://blog.aaronmphotography.com/ gives a similar feeling, but it is different. It shares the color palette and logo. The menu on his smug site is on the side, while the menu on his blog is across the top.

That said, you can certainly create a blog within your smug site using pages. It may take a little more maintenance from a category standpoint unless you go the folder route.

PhilCorleyPhoto

Can you link to a Wordpress.com blog, or do you need to link to your own hosted blog?

denisegoldberg

If you want it to have your own URL and not a wordpress.com URL then you probably need a hosted blog. I'm not a wordpress user so I'm only guessing; my blog is in blogger.

I believe @Hikin' Mike will be able to answer your Wordpress questions. I think he will see this post.

Hikin' Mike

EDITED

There are two ways to have a WordPress site/blog and both are free, but one has more options.

The '.org' is the self-hosted version. That is what I use. You can edit any theme you pick.

The '.com' version doesn't have the option to edit themes. You also can't get a custom URL. You are stuck with 'username.wordpress.com'.

So what you want is the '.org' version and yes, you can create links from your WordPress site to your SmugMug site. That's exactly what I do.

Hikin' Mike

Update:

I have the other version as well. I created it years ago just to test it and forgot about it until you mentioned it. You do have the option of creating a link from your WordPress site to your SmugMug site.

PhilCorleyPhoto

Thanks guys; I will have a think on this and try a few options out

Phil