My organization uses the blog feature of our website to post announcements of events and things going on in our community. We then link the post to our newsletter, sent out on a weekly basis. Quite often, announcements are posted weeks before the event takes place. We want the current announcements to show up at the top of the blog, but we also want to keep a record of the announcements as they've been made week-by-week. (For example, we want to be able to look back at the blog and see that "this" announcement was made five times, or "that" announcement was first made on such-and-such a date.)

(If you'd like to see an example of what I'm referring to, you can see our blog here.)

Currently, each week, when I need to repost an announcement, I have to make a new blog post, and I have to copy and paste the information from last week's announcement into the "new" announcement. I have to reattach photos, recreate links to websites or email addresses, and I have to make sure the text formatting is the same. If something changes with the event (ex. a different date or a changed venue), I have to go back to all previous posts and change the content manually (to avoid confusion, in case someone doesn't look at the most recent post). This process is tedious and time-consuming, and it would be helpful to have an easier way to manage it.

My suggestion, then, is two-fold. (1) It would be useful to have a "Duplicate" button alongside the "Add", "Remove", and "Edit" buttons, which creates a new post with the same content as the selected (“original”) post. (2) Duplicated posts are affiliated in a string, and the "Duplicate" window has an option to "Link" the post with others in the same string. When "Link" is selected and changes are made, the changes are reflected in all linked posts in the string (but, of course, not in posts belonging to different strings). If "Link" is not selected, changes made only affect the current post. (3) Tags should only link to the most recent post in a string.

Allow me to illustrate (1) and (2) with an example (suggestion (3) is explained below):

Last week, I uploaded four posts to my blog: A1, B1, C1, and D1. This week, I want to repost blogs A, B, and D. I select blog A1 and click "Duplicate". In the new window, I modify the URL and click "Link", and then "OK"; this is now blog A2.

Then I select blog B1, click "Duplicate" (making blog B2), and modify the URL. I click "Link", and then modify the post to change the date of the event. Because blog B2 is linked to B1, the changed information is also automatically changed in blog B1. (But since these blogs are in a different string from the A blogs, the A blogs are unaffected by this change.)

I click "OK", and then I duplicate blog D (making blog D2). I want to change the picture in blog D2, but I don't want the picture in blog D1 to change. I change the picture with the "Link" option deselected. Blog D2 now has a different picture than blog D1. But then I realize, whoops, the email address is not correct. So now I click "Link", and I change the email address. Since the D blogs are now linked, the email address is changed in both blogs. The pictures are still different (because the picture was changed when "Link" was not selected).

I click "OK", and then I export my blog to the website. The list of blog posts on the website now shows: D2, B2, A2, D1, C1, B1, A1. Blogs A1 and A2 are identical, just with different URLs. Blogs B2 and B1 are identical, with the correct event date in both posts. Blog C1 has not been reposted, and so has not been changed. Blogs D1 and D2 are nearly identical, with the correct email address linked in both posts, but with different photos in each one.

Regarding suggestion (3):

Tags for linked posts should only target the most recent post in a string. For example, blog A has the tag "party", blog B has the tag "conference", and blog D has the tag "meeting". When I look in the tag cloud and click on "party", I should only see blog A2 (not blog A1); likewise for blogs B and D. Otherwise, if in the course of (ex.) three months, we have 3 parties, and each party is announced every week starting 4 weeks before the party, then clicking the "party" tag would show 12 blog entries.

Additionally, say, for example, in the same three months, we have 4 meetings, but we only announce each meeting twice (thus, 8 total posts about meetings). If every instance of "meeting" were included in the tags, then the tag cloud would show "party" more prominently than it would "meeting” (because there are 12 “party” posts and only 8 “meeting” posts), even though, in reality, there were more meetings than parties.

Thus, if only the most recent post of a string of posts is counted in the tags, then clicking on “party” shows three posts (the most recent posts about the parties), and clicking on “meeting” shows four posts, and in the tag cloud, “meeting” is slightly more prominent than “party”.

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I hope that you find these suggestions useful, and I hope that they may be incorporated into a future release of Website X5. I’m happy to respond to questions or comments to help improve and/or clarify the suggestions. Thank you for your kind consideration!