Is there a blog platform that allows more than one entry to be "on top"?

June 10, 2007 7:43 PM

Is there a blog platform that allows more than one entry to be "on top"?

I write for a blog with a couple other people, currently using blogger.com. One of our problems is that we often trip over ourselves by posting serveral entries per day, bumping the most recent to the top, and others down. Often, this is not desirable.

We'd love to find a blog platform (service or software) that would allow a multi-column format. -- Sure, I've seen 2, 3, 4 column layouts, but every time, one column is for the posts, and the remaining columns are for "navagation" or other modules. -- That won't solve our problem.

I realize there may be other CMS platforms that could handle this more .. "newspaper" .. format. Whatever the solution, it would need to be simple to operate, add and manage posts. A blog format is desirable, as it's so simple to operate.

Is there a blog platform out there that allows for 2+ columns of posts?

posted by duncantuna to computers & internet (10 comments total)

You mean something like this? You could e-mail the guy and see if he can tell you what platform he uses, or if minds you copying his CSS (or whatever).
posted by AV at 8:03 PM on June 10, 2007

Think about whether you want to subject your readers to this. That crimeblog link shows how hectic it looks... you have no idea where to start reading.
posted by smackfu at 8:07 PM on June 10, 2007

Take a look at this YGO theme that features two content columns down the middle (info and download).
posted by davidmsc at 8:08 PM on June 10, 2007

Joomla.

It's really a CMS but you can set it up as a blog pretty easily.
posted by unSane at 8:15 PM on June 10, 2007

There are several multi-column themes for Wordpress (and I'm a Wordpress convert, so I always try to push it), such as Hemingway which has two posts on top, a list of recent posts at the bottom, and looks really cool. There are several more "magazine" or "newspaper" style themes.

You could also set Wordpress up so that just the first 140 words or so of each post displays, so there are more posts on the first screen of the site.
posted by Brittanie at 8:17 PM on June 10, 2007

Oh, duh, it says at the bottom of crimeblog that it is Wordpress's Hemingway! Good call, Brittanie.
posted by AV at 8:58 PM on June 10, 2007

If you're willing to code your own template and style, you can do this pretty easily. I know Textpattern allows it, and I don't imagine that Wordpress/MT/Mephisto/whatever else would be too difficult to wrangle into what you want.
posted by phaded at 9:47 PM on June 10, 2007

Cam Barrett did something like this with WatchBlog (which seems pretty readable despite the information density) a couple of years ago using Movable Type.

I work with the MT team, so I've gotten to see a lot of more magazine-style designs. I love the Seed Magazine site as an example, and it's done entirely in MT as well. There are lots more great examples in this older AskMe thread.
posted by anildash at 9:50 PM on June 10, 2007

you could write custom loops in PHP to place two categories side by side.

This guy shows a way to do it.
posted by Blandanomics at 9:57 PM on June 10, 2007

You could also set up a 3-column layout with CSS, with three separate DIVs, and use a PHP include for each person's blog in each column. You know,

<DIV ID="1"> <?php include ("person_a_blogger.html"); ?> </DIV>

<DIV ID="2"> <?php include ("person_b_blogger.html"); ?> </DIV>

<DIV ID="3"> <?php include ("person_c_blogger.html"); ?> </DIV> 

The only downside, if you look at it that way, would be that each person would have to have their own separate blog, rather than all having posting rights on the same blog. But each person's newest entries would be at the top of their column.

Actually, if you use each person's name as a "label" in Blogger, you could just do an include for the label page for each person's name instead, and it could still be all on one blog.

Blogger actually addresses the idea of multiple blogs on a page in their help section.
posted by Gator at 2:43 AM on June 11, 2007