@iamgrammy

1) You can definitely create a user account for each artist and set the permissions as restricted or as broad as you need

2) You need to choose between 2 options:

• A) either each artists will have their own blog (a little place of their own) and you will "aggregate" all those blogs together on a home page
• B) or you want to have only one blog and each artist can contribute posts to it (without touching the posts from the others)

Both solutions are equally doable. Let us know which one you prefer.

3) Instead of reinstalling without emo, you can just go to the admin dashboard and delete all the collections you don't need.

• For scenario A above, delete forums, manual, etc and keep only Home, Blog A & Blog B as a starting point.
• For scenario B above, delete everything but Blog A or Blog B depending on which is preconfigured most to your liking

Then we'll go from there... ;)

Sensory overload! I just sat there, blinking stupidly at all these "bells and whistles" and heard myself say, "I can't do this...... It's too much, I can't do this....."

Thank you for that feedback. We are trying to make the first mile experience much simpler in b2evolution version 7.

@fplanque Thank you for taking the time to wade through this with me. Just having you reassure me that this can be done is pretty encouraging. I don't know much about blogs and I've never given much thought before, when reading someone's blog, as to the mechanism behind it.

Ideally, I would hope to have all the available blogs represented on the main blog page I've designed and, from there, have each one clickable to that particular artist's blog page (which would also be in keeping with the overall site design). That would be option A, I suppose.

I feel I should apologize for speaking of how overwhelmed I was when I completed the installation and saw everything. It just felt so vast to a "groper" like me. It's very impressive, overall, with everything anyone could possibly want under one "cyber roof". But I think that, for the very faint of heart (like me) it might be a good idea to allow users to click check-boxes next to the components they actually are looking for, with the option to "install all" for the very brave.

Thank you again, I appreciate this.

@iamgrammy

Welcome to the 'club' It seems you are going to have fun, even if, as you say, it's a bit daunting. In the upcoming version (v7) there are checkboxes for the blogs you want to make :)

So it looks like you will use @fplanque 's A option and have an aggregate blog that with have links to the individuals. As far as each artist having their own blog you can either create one for each, as they request, or allow them to do it themselves once they register. I suppose the issue then is the ability and desire for those individuals to do it all themselves or have you be the labourer. You can of course have a mix of both. You can provide the option for users to create their own blog and should they not want to, and you are willing, do it for the odd one or two hundred.

Al the best

@amoun Thanks so much for the encouragement! I'm really hoping, of course, that the majority of these members will take the initiative and create their own blogs. It's a sort of "by invitation" registration. Hopefully, most of them are already versed in Facebook, Reddit, etc., and can manage basic text/image/media placement. My concern is how to get their "Publish" click to pipeline their input out to where I need it to go (which would leave a footprint on the main blog page and then ultimately travel on to the individual artist's personal blog page). That will be the bulk of today, I suppose... my learning how to direct traffic.

I must say, I'm looking forward to version 7. :-)

@iamgrammy . . . My concern is how to get their "Publish" click to pipeline their input out to where I need it to go . . .

To help you with that it would be good to have detail. For example the individual's blog can be listed in the 'sitewide header' of a column list.

A selection, or the most recent 'art' can be accessed by a having the 'author' make the 'art'icle available not only in their own blog but also in a category in the aggregate blog called 'Most Recent'

There are probably other ways of doing it and I'm sure others will put in their two (pennies/cents) worth.

Once you have the basic site up and running people can better see what it is you are trying to do.

So no doubt 'speak' to you soon :)

@iamgrammy Can you post a screenshot or a drawing of your homepage design so we are all on the same page?

I'm not sure if you want to list the blogs / artist names there or if you want to list the latest blog posts of the artists all mixed together, or a little bit of both.

Well.... this is what my site would look like if I had a working blog, ha. (Thank God for Gimp!)

View 1 would be where the blogs would land as previews (I thought I'd better not actually use their art, so dogs and cats are always good).
View 2 would be where the full blog (the top one, in this case) lands when you click on it (from view 1). That's where the comments for that blog would also live.

I hope I'm making sense. So, my desire is that all the blogs can land as "previews" on View 1, whenever the artist clicks "Publish" and then the full blog would pipeline out to View 2 (or whatever page belongs to that particular artist) when the visitor sees it on view 1 and clicks it.

I'm apologize for not being as brief as I should be.

@amoun @fplanque
Thank you both for your patience.

OK, so whenever you say "blog" you actually mean "blog post".

What a "blog" really means is: many "bog posts" typically ordered by date, most recent first.

So what you want is basically a standard blog with multiple authors.

So you can delete all collections, except Blog A. Then enable advanced permissions for Blog A and give different users or user groups permissions to post their own blog posts, but not edit other people's blog posts.

Ah! (I actually understood that!)

Thanks so much; off I go with the big hammer. :)