I want to maintain at least two different personas on my Drupal-based blog: (1) Professional (2) Personal. Naturally, each would have its own set of blog entries that generally would not intersect, although they might sometimes.
My question is: What is the best way to organize and display each of these personas as its own blog, and still be able to show them together in one blog stream when I want to?
My thought is to use two different vocabularies: "Personal Blog" and "Professional Blog". Each time I post a blog entry, I can choose to tag it with a term in one or both vocabularies. Then, I would have three blog streams:
* www.mysite.com/blog -- stream of all blog posts
* www.mysite.com/blogs/personal -- stream of personal blog posts
* www.mysite.com/blogs/professional -- stream of professional blog posts
Any suggestions how this might be done better? Any examples of where it's being done today?
Thanks,
Erik
Comments
My first thought was using
My first thought was using different node types, but if you're anticipating that you might have some posts that might apply to both segments of your life, I'd put in a vote of confidence for the taxonomy based system you've devised. :)
Works
The other thing I've done in the past is to have all "professional" posts promoted to the front page, but the more personal ones remain in my blog (and are accessible to anyone subscribed to the full blog feed, rather than just the front page)
Downside to this is that you can't make a "personal only" feed.
Taxonomy and Views are the
Taxonomy and Views are the best bet. As you said already, use one "weblog" content type but create a "persona" vocabulary with "personal" and "professional" terms. When creating a new weblog entry, select which category you want (personal or professional) and publish it. Depending on how you set up your views, you can have listings and RSS feeds for all of your weblog entries, just the entries authored by you and categorized as "personal", etc.
To keep your sanity, I recommend avoiding the core blog module unless you like its breadcrumbs and want its "blog" paths and "blog/feed" feeds set up for automatically.
Taxonomy and Views, or Workflow and Views, or OG
Taxonomy can definitely handle this out of the box, but getting views into the mix will allow you to have more control over presentation.
You could also use workflow and workflow access for this -- this would also allow you to create draft states, and set up scheduled publishing, and views could then come in and filter on different workflow states (ie, public or personal) for the different blogs.
You could also use OG for this -- it would definitely be overkill, but using OG's functionality that allows you to have a different theme per group, you could style your personal posts differently than your professional posts.
And I strongly second christefano's suggestion: avoid the core blog module.
Cheers,
Bill
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I use different websites for
I use different websites for personal and professional blogging. On my personal site I have a display block of blog post titles from the professional site (using the aggregator module). I also mention the professional site in the About page.