Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

Although I try to present Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs from the front end as three separate blogs, from the back end it's only a single blog. It's a single blog with three categories, A Quranic Journal, The Clipboard, and veiled4allah.

I've set up an index template for each of the categories and limit the display of entries to that category using

<MTEntries category="categoryname" lastn="20">

I've also set up an index template called "Main Index" that displays recent entries from each of the categories in its own column. This is again done by setting up a separate MTEntries container for each category, this time in a table side by side by side.

Why did I do it this way? When I was still using Blogger, I had three separate blogs but people mostly ignored A Quranic Journal and The Clipboard in favor of veiled4allah. I hoped that if I integrated the three into one, visitors to veiled4allah would see the other categories and check them out.

One drawback to the way that I have things set up is that the main index for Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs is more a portal than a real blog page and so some of the blog ecosystem tools like Blogdex don't know what to do with it. Also, some people choose to put only veiled4allah on their blogroll instead of listing Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs there and that confuses BlogTree, BlogStreet and similar tools.

This is definitely not a solution for everybody. The main benefit is that you can set up a portal and integrate posts on very different content without needing to use SSI or PHP.

In later posts, inshallah, I'll discuss more details about my three-blogs-in-one set up.