I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction. I searched the forums and could not find anything.

Thanks

JMCSMITH

A very easy thing to implement.

A user creates a topic, sets the Status to "BLOG" and then on the page below, I grab the last X posts and display them.

http://packershome.com/Blog.aspx 

My next course of action is to add a customizable 'buy me a beer' link for each specific blogger and also a drop down menu to view all blogs from a specific blogger.

Here's the sql statement I've been using to query the most recent 10 blog entries.

SELECT TOP 10 T.TopicID, U.Name, T.Posted, T.Topic, M.Message 
FROM yaf_Topic as T 
LEFT JOIN yaf_Message as M 
ON T.TopicID = M.TopicID 
LEFT JOIN yaf_User as U 
ON U.UserID = T.UserID 
WHERE T.Status = 'Blog' 
AND M.Position = 0 
ORDER BY T.Posted DESC

SELECT TOP 10 T.TopicID, U.Name, T.Posted, T.Topic, M.Message 
FROM yaf_Topic as T 
LEFT JOIN yaf_Message as M 
ON T.TopicID = M.TopicID 
LEFT JOIN yaf_User as U 
ON U.UserID = T.UserID 
WHERE T.Status = 'Blog' 
AND M.Position = 0 
ORDER BY T.Posted DESC

This is exactly what I am trying to do! Could you point me in the direction of the Statuses and where you set them when making a post?

Thanks!

Then navigate to your yaf_admin_topicstatus.aspx page and add your custom status.

Make sure to make Status' available for users. To verify this, under Host > Features look for the Allow Topic Status Option checkbox.

one more question. Is there a way to make it so only admin can apply a status?

SELECT TOP 10 T.TopicID, U.Name, T.Posted, T.Topic, M.Message 
FROM yaf_Topic as T 
LEFT JOIN yaf_Message as M 
ON T.TopicID = M.TopicID 
LEFT JOIN yaf_User as U 
ON U.UserID = T.UserID 
WHERE T.Status = 'Blog' 
AND M.Position = 0🅱 AND M.IsDeleted = 0 AND M.IsApproved = 1[/b]
ORDER BY T.Posted DESC

True. I don't worry about that because I do not have any messages that are tagged delete or not approved. I delete them to avoid cluttering up my database. But for others, yes, excellent addition and oversight on my part! THank you.

Unfortunately, I don't know. I was thinkign it would be great to make it accessible by a group/role but haven't figured that out. So for me, its open to everyone.

I am going to say, but I can't explain how other than to check the Access and Role configurations be clever!

I believe you can set the forum section to only reply for "members" and then another access/role to allow bloggers to create topics.

Created a new access mask and assigned it to registered users for the "blog" forum. They can now reply but not create a thread. I should then be able to retrieve the top 10 posts with a 0 position using a query like this:

SELECT TOP 10 T.TopicID, U.Name, T.Posted, T.Topic, M.Message 
FROM yaf_Topic as T 
LEFT JOIN yaf_Message as M 
ON T.TopicID = M.TopicID 
LEFT JOIN yaf_User as U 
ON U.UserID = T.UserID 
WHERE t.ForumID=3
AND M.Position = 0 AND M.IsDeleted = 0 AND M.IsApproved = 1
ORDER BY T.Posted DESC

with the forumid 3 being the blog forum