FWIW I'd say give each dept their own blog and use only one skin for the whole deal. That way each dept will be able to take full advantage of parent and child categories and the whole city web will carry the same feel from dept to dept. As far as changing the graphic goes, that's easy. Just tell the depts to give you a jpg (gif, png, whatever) file of xxx width and yyy height, then do like http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=1064 shows. Now each dept gets to run their own thing, the city has a constant look across all depts, and you only have to deal with one folder - your skinname folder.

Thanks EdB

That's a good thought about the images, unfortunately each department's page would have different links and content on their specific page.

Only about 4 departments need a news section, so a least there should only be 4 skins to manage.

This at least gets me rolling with b2evo. I can't wait till the next version is released. It looks like their has been a lot of new hacks added since this most recent release. :)

How should I handle the stub files for the skins?

I have b2evo installed at
www.domain.com/apps/b2evo

I need to access the main blog from my homepage.
I need to access the library department's blog from:
www.domain.com/library/

Based on that, should I place a stub in the root of my website and in www.domain.com/library/?

What option do I select to access these blogs? What do I set for the stub name?

Thanks for the help

You should really read some of the howtos and info provided with .9.0.10 basic installation. Especially looking through the tabs in the back office to see what's up. Skins are a cart. Stubs and your back office setup are your horse. Guess which one comes first!

Different linkage on any given blog is a function of your linkblog selection, and you can select a different linkblog for each blog. In fact you would have to no matter what skin selection you make for any given blog. Lets say you have 10 departments. You make up 11 blogs 1 is the aggregator blog so you make 2 through 11 for the departments. Now you make #12 be the linkblog. No matter what skin you pick all blogs will have the same linkage displayed, which is not what you are saying. If you want 10 blogs with 10 different link collections then you need 10 more blogs to use as linkblogs. Doesn't matter what skin you use or how many or if you enable switching - what matters is which blog is identified as a linkblog for any given blog. You might want to make a simple rule: even number blogs for departments, odd number blogs for the department's linkblog.

Stubs have nothing to do with skins - they are associated with the blog. For your example you would first pick "other blog through stub file" in your access settings for each blog. I THINK your root access would come from telling it ../../stub_name.php but I'm not sure. I would move the blog up to the top level myself then just not let it be the index or default file names. For the library blog I think you would use ../../library/index.php but again I wouldn't have b2evo two levels down from the root. Either way, to use a stub you have to create a stub in the path you define. Copy a_stub.php as whatever you want the stub called and save it in whatever folder you need. Edit it and change the line that says "$blog = 2;" to the blog number you are working on. That's it! Everything else, well, almost everything else is controlled through the back office on the blogs tab.

Skins are for looks more than anything else although you do get to include or exclude content by including or excluding includes for various items.

Edb,

All I have been doing is reading the documentation and forums. There just isn't much about "Access parameters".

[u]1st Try:[/u]
I tried copying a_stub.php and placing it into the root of my website. Then I set access type to "other blog through stub". Then I entered for the URL blog name "../../stub.php".

Then I went to domain.com/stub.php and the blog was displayed but nothing was working right (comments, permalinks).

[u]2nd Try:[/u]
So then I tried setting the access type to "other blog through index.php"
URL blog name = main

Then I went to domain.com/stub.php and everything seemed to work, except a couple of things seemed weird.

1. The permalinks, comments, etc uses domain.com/apps/b2/index.php/main/2004/08/31/this_is_a_test
for a permalink.
Shouldn't it use something like domain.com/stub.php/2004/08/31/this_is_a_test ?

2. Their is a cross post from Blog B in Blog A that is a multipage post. When I click on Page 3 of the multipage post it simply takes me to the beginning of the post displayed in Blog B. I think it is because of this below, but it seems like it should display Page 3 of the post in Blog B instead of just taking me to the beginning of the post.

# If a particular post is requested (by id or title) but on the wrong blog,
# do you want to automatically redirect to the right blog?
# This is overly usefull if you move posts or categories from one blog to another
# If this is disabled, the post will be displayed in the wrong blog template.
$redirect_to_postblog = true;

Does any of this sound like I am doing this the right way?
Thanks for your patience. I need b2evo installed in that specific directory, maybe I could change $baseurl to www.domain.com and the relative paths to the other b2evo folders. Then set access type to "other blog through stub file" and set URL blog name= stub.php.

What do you think?

I think you're on to the crux of your issues with the last bit about what your base_url is in conjunction with your folder structure, but I really can't be sure. That's why I would move the whole installation up so that the root really was the base url. And of course change the base_url parameter to match. All other b2evo ways of accomplishing tasks will just naturally follow.

Whatever you actually have at your root domain doesn't have to be a b2evo page. When I was making b2evo take over my club's web I had the original (all html files) web still working like normal and had b2evo right there alongside. I had a moment of quick-renames on initial installation because "default.php" or it might have been "index.php" suddenly became the webs home page. I renamed those pages with "_b2evo" after the real name so that my visitors didn't freak out. Oh and every time I "exited to blog" I ended up at the html page, but I got used to that during the transition. Knowing what I now know, and if I had to do a similar task, I would rename them before I upload everything, or maybe just delete them.

Final thought on that idea: I assume your users within the various departments are going to be allowed to post stuff into a subset of all your blogs? You might want to do a search in the forum for "exit to active blog" (all words) and my name. It only works for stub users, but with that hack they won't exit to the base_url value and get lost. They will post in blog N and exit to the stub for blog N. This way your root main page is whatever you want it to be, your base_url is your root, and blog #1 is (for example) blog_a_stub.php. No one ever exits to domain.com and no one ever sees blog_a_stub.php unless you tell them about it. Did that make sense? It's looking bad in preview mode but it's the best I can do.

Seems you've got a complicated task going on. I encourage you to make domain.com be base_url by really having b2evo installed in your root, then deal with the minor issues that come up in actual use instead of trying to deal with the multi-level complex issues you've identified.

Life is Good!