QuamPlures - A multi-blog app made by users who care

While Quam Plures can be used as a standalone blogging platform, it is also designed to be used as a blog/news/content manager to be embedded in a larger site.

For example, our website - quamplures.net - itself uses quamplures for several sections such as the news blog, the screenshots browser,...

Yet, other parts of the site are just static pages or even pages generated by other software such as phpBB for the forums.

Achieving this basically only requires 2 steps:

1. Anchor a Quam Plures blog to one or more specific location(s) of your website through the use of stub files.
2. Adapt the look & feel of your QP blogs in order to match the rest of your site by customizing a template.

Installing Quam Plures as part of a larger site

You can install Quam Plures at the root of your website or within a subdirectory.

The easiest solution is to install at the root. If that is not an option, try to install QP at a level that is high enough for all your projected "blog pages" to be under the QP folder. If that is not an option either, it *is* possible to have QP blogs running outside of the QP root *but* that will require you to edit some paths in the advanced config file.

Once Quam Plures is installed, you'll want to place stub files at the different locations where you'll want Quam Plures to generate dynamic content pages.

One of the easiest ways to do that is to move the sub files that come with Quam Plures (named blog1.php, blog2.php, etc...) to their desired location and rename them to what you want. Do not forget to also adjust the new URL/location of your blog(s) in the backoffice under Blog Settings > URLs.

For details, see Call a blog from a subdirectory and repeat for as many blogs/website sections as needed.

Porting the site design to your blog

There are basically 2 ways to proceed here:

• Either you find a template which works "close enough" to the design of your site and you then tweak it in order to match your site. Edit the CSS, add the site navigation...
• Or you start with a static page of what your blog should look like in your site. You then create a template form scratch and add the Template tags into the page one by one to make it dynamic.

See Create a template based on an existing layout.

Set up your webserver

If you are using shared hosting, check that your hosting plan allows multiple domains and set those up as "Domain Aliases".

If your are using a VPS or a dedicated server, make sure to set up your webserver so that all (sub-)domains map to the same DocumentRoot (as it's called in Apache). So accessing foo.example.com should go to the same DocumentRoot ("public_html" folder) as bar.example.com. Of course, you can also map www.otherdomain.com to the same place.

apache2.conf should include something like this:

 <VirtualHost *>
 ServerName mydomain.com
 ServerAlias *.mydomain.com
 ServerAlias *otherdomain.com
 UseCanonicalName Off
 DocumentRoot /home/mydomain/www
 DirectoryIndex index.html index_multi.php
 </VirtualHost>

See also: Multi-domain test-environment

Set up your blogs

Go to Blog Settings > URLs and select "Absolute URL" as the "Blog Base URL". Set this to the full URL of your blog, e.g. http://myblog.example.com/. (Don't forget the trailing slash or you will get an error!)

Optionally Set up mod_rewrite

You have to create a .htaccess file (or append it to an existing one) in your blog root directory (e.g. .htaccess) with the following content:

# BEGIN QP
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END QP

This will redirect every request that is not an existing file or directory to /index.php, where Quam Plures will detect the requested blog out of the absolute URL.

Cookies

If all your blogs are on a subdomain of a global domain ($baseurl), you don't need to adjust the cookie stuff.

Otherwise, in order to make your cookies, especially the SessionCookie, available across all your subdomains, you could explicitly set

$cookie_domain = '.example.com';

in /conf/_advanced.php.

If you are not using subdomains, but different domains, the following should work:

$cookie_domain = '.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];

htsrv URL

The htsrv URL gets used (e.g. for posting comments or plugins use this) as callback (e.g. the captcha_img_plugin). Especially for AJAX callbacks it's important that the callback is to the same domain and uses the same protocol (http/https). With some firewalls this is also needed for images.

Therefore you should dynamically create the $htsrv_url variable (located in /conf/_advanced.php), e.g.:

$htsrv_url = ( (isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && ( $_SERVER['HTTPS'] != 'off' ) ) ?'https://':'http://').$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/htsrv/';

One of the strengths of Quam Plures is that it is able to handle multiple blogs out of the box. As a matter of fact, on most installations it will come with multiple blogs pre-installed.

Multiblog Scenarios

Multiple blogs can be used in several different scenarios:

• One website with multiple blogs accessible through different names - blog1.php, blog2.php, blog3.php, etc. This is the default setup, you can then change the names of the php files to suit your needs. Each blog can also have a different subject, purpose or even content type - i.e., podcasts, or photoblogs.
• One website with multiple blogs scattered through a complex tree of subfolders.
• One domain with multiple blogs accessible through subdomains - blog1.domain.com, blog2.domain.com, etc. Again, you can choose any name to suit your needs.
• One Quam Plures installation serving multiple domains.
• Any combination of the above.

Running Quam Plures on a local server (your own computer) is often desirable for testing, editing (and testing) templates, running the CVS (latest development) version, or for a variety of other reasons. This is not a way to update or add posts to your internet blog while you are offline and then try to upload them to your website later.

To setup a local copy of QP you need the following minimum software requirements installed and running on your computer:

• Webserver software (Apache is recommended)
• PHP 5.
• MySQL 4.x.

Setting up your hosting environment is the most challenging part of this process. You can search the internet for some pre-bundled packages which can make it a lot easier to install the software you need (e.g. Wamp or xampp).

1. After your hosting environment is up and running, create an empty MySQL database for Quam Plures to use.
2. Put the Quam Plures program files into your webserver's web directory. (In your browser this directory shows up as http://localhost/. On your hardrive it may be something like /htdocs or /www.)
3. From your browser go to the /install directory for Quam Plures. For example http://localhost/QP/install.
4. Run the installer just like you would for any new installation.

That should do it! Now anytime you want to access your local copy of Quam Plures you can start Apache and MySQL and type your localhost address into your browser.

The identity a particular user assumes in a blog is called their Role. A Role essentially describes the set of tasks, called Capabilities, a person is allowed to perform. For instance, the role of Administrator encompasses every possible task that can be performed within a Quam Plures installation. The Author role on the other hand, allows the execution of just a small subset of tasks.