Angry Shaking Fist

I’m getting a number of questions directed from a site I built (based on my Napkin theme) for my friend Wong as to how I was able to create a “two blogs in one” effect (shown here). Well, it all goes back to when I was a kid…kidding, here is a quick tutorial on how to achieve this effect on your WordPress blog. Please leave any questions you have in the comments section.

create blog pages

Here we’ll create the pages where our blog posts will live. Nothing special here. Simply click the “Add New” link under “Pages” in your admin console. Name/Save them. (I’m calling mine ‘His Blog’ and ‘Her Blog’). We’ll come back to these pages later.

create page templates

Using Page Templates, we can customize the layout of specific pages. Copy your page.php file and create two page templates. I’ve named my files his_template.php/her_template.php and gave them template names of His/Her respectively.

Now we’ll place the following code just before the Loop in our his_template.php page.

[php wraplines="false" toolbar="false"]
<?php query_posts ( ‘meta_key=blizzog&meta_value=his’ ); ?>
[/php]

This code queries our blog posts for the Custom Field name ‘blizzog’ with the value of ‘his’. This will gather all of the his blog posts for display by the Loop. We’ll do the same for our her_template.php page, changing the meta_value to her.

Now that we’ve done all the heavy-lifting in creating our templates, we need only access them via the His/Her blog pages we created in our very first step. In the Attributes section, under the Templates header, we’ll select the proper template for each page and save.

populate custom fields

The only thing that needs to be done now is setting our custom fields so that our query code will know which posts to show on which page. When writing a post for Her Blog, label the ‘blizzog’ custom field to ‘her’ (and ‘his’ for His blog).

In part 2, we’ll look at how to display recent posts from both blogs on your homepage as seen in the example.

Tags: design, development, tutorial, wordpress, wp themes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 13:29 and is filed under wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.