Nope and nope ... sorry

¥

Hi mostmodernist. I'll try and be brief about this: nope, and no.

How's that for brief?

Categories that exist in each blog is not possible. You can re-use the name, but it will be technically a different category for each blog. You can't re-use the "cat URL name" or something like that ... for some reason. However if you're going to aggregate everything from other blogs into #1 then put the categories widget in the sidebar on blog #1 and all the cats from all the blogs will be listed on blog #1. Even if blog #1 has no cats of it's own. Close?

Defining default stuff would be way cool, but I don't even know which file/files to hack to make it so. I've been thinking lately (which is where things start to go seriously downhill) that it'd be neat to have something that we can use to say "all the settings from blog N shall now be applied to blog Y" even if you don't have a blog N or Y. It would be for pretty much whatever you wanted to call your blogs. I'm flexible about stuff like that is the thing.

BTW plugins are global. It'll be widgets you want to automagically get the way you want (I think), so look around for a widget manager plugin. It is clunky to use but it duplicates widgets from this blog to that blog where you get to define which is 'this' and which is 'that'. Defining default cats would be neat too, but again I've no idea how it would be carved into the system. And again they wouldn't be the same cats - just carry a very-much-the-same name.

Oh and welcome to the forums :)

¥åßßå wins for briefyness!

Thanks for the info. (OP here, for some reason my forum account immediately went inactive and I had to make another).

Ed, the aggregate method you mentioned might work. I like that as an option, though I might just disable categories altogether.

Don't worry, I'll have some questions about aggregating later.

You won't be able to post without a category!

The thing is even though we think "a post in a blog with a category or two" what is actually happening is that a post is attached to a category (and potentially subcats), which in turn is attached to a blog. So a post absolutely needs a category in order to exist.

Oh and ... uh ... welcome to the forums mostmodernist_jenny. Perhaps you know a new friend of mine? mostmodernist ;)

well o well

i couldn't disable categories, it's true, i tried.

i'll just paint over them or hang a picture :)

also: i'm constantly being logged/timed out of admin, even though i set it to 30000 seconds. is this indicative of a bigger problem?

Yup. cookieish, which is a word I personally invented just a little while ago. It means "like a cookie only I don't know what I'm talking about". Search the forums a wee bit and see if something comes up. Probably something by ¥åßßå but with this being reasonably new I dunno if it really is cookieish or not.

Anyway if you're not successful at finding a solution via search then please start a new thread so's we can apply for the "2009 Tidiest Forum In The World" competition. Like, keeping threads on topic is the thing.