I want to have a list of articles, similar to a category blog, but I want to use existing articles that already fall into a variety of categories. Since an article can't (so far as I know) have more than one category, a category blog won't work.
For example, I already have a category blog for "coming events". It's easy as pie to manage: I just have to add or remove articles assigned to the "coming events" category. It's basically automatic. If you look at http://www.sinaict.org, you'll see what I mean.
Now I want to have a similar list of articles, but the articles themselves might be in different categories (e.g., "social action", "education", "worship", and so forth). I could use an article-based blog, but that requires putting in the IDs of all the articles. That would be a horrendous mess to manage, since I'd have to edit the list of IDs.
Similarly, I could use a custom HTML module with a link to each article, but that would also be a nuisance to manage. It would be very easy to "lose" an article, or to leave behind a broken link.
I might well be missing some feature that can do this for me. Does anyone have any ideas?
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While I have not tried this, I think that is what tags are for. While an article belongs to one and only one category, it can have multiple tags.
Just as you can create a Menu Item Type of Category Blog, you can create a Menu Item Type of Tagged Items. Since the article can have more than one tag it can appear in more than one menu item.
Well, I'm not sure that's what tags are for. I think they are used for searching, but I haven't really looked into it.
You are right, though: they can be used to accomplish what I want. I set up a RAXO blog, let it have all categories, and then filtered by the tag. That gave me a module that looked right but behaved in an awkward way.
If I click on the "more" text next to the article title, I get a display of the article contents but it is followed by a row of "tag" icons. Underneath (obscured by) the icons is the title of the blog module. Clicking on that generates a page with all of the blog articles, expanded. The page heading is the tag (although there is probably a way of getting rid of that).
In short, it starts out looking like what I want; but its general functionality isn't what I was looking for.
You can get rid of the tow of "tag" icons at the bottom of the page in Global Configuration. Select Articles, then change "Show Tags" from "show" to "hide".
I just tried it, and it seems to work exactly as a category blog, but just uses tags instead of categories.
Thanks, that does seem to do what I want.