Wordpress Multisite Tools?

February 2, 2011 1:29 PM

Is it just me, or is displaying cross-network data from a multisite installation of Wordpress bizarrely hard? Can you recommend some non-Wordpress solutions to overcome my hurdles?

There's the Sitewide Tags plugin, which works (to my mind) very strangely by duplicating every post and posting them to a master blog. Odd as this is it gets me a long way, but there are other things I can't seem to do, and I can't believe no one has figured this out already...

Among other things I need to be able to display lists of most recommended and most viewed posts across the network, as well as create identical custom taxonomies (which are actually huge, and it's a non-trivial effort to re-do every time I add a new blog).

Anybody got any good links?

posted by crickets to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Reduplicating content is the way WordPressMU handled it for aggregating content to a master blog. I don't have a lot of experience with MU or with the now-integrated Multisite features, but it seems to me that you'll need new widgets built that query against all the different blogs available, and I'm not sure that's been done. A site that purports to be composed of MU experts as of less than a month ago sort of has a solution, but basically there appear to be no extant solutions for this kind of aggregate query and display for a Multisite network of blogs.

Now, my understanding is you probably could do something like switch_to_blog() calls across an array of blog ids, and for each one use query_posts() with orderby=comment_count (or whatever criteria you're using to determine most recommended), then aggregate that all in PHP, then display. Seems straightforward but if you have a lot of blogs it probably is something you would want to schedule and do in such a way that site performance is not impacted.

I'm curious to hear what you come up with for this. I've done a fair amount of WordPress hacking and would be happy to help out if you MeMail me. Another tack is to ask over on the pretty-darn-good http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/.
posted by artlung at 2:02 PM on February 2, 2011

I wrote a plugin to duplicate a custom taxonomy across all blogs in a multisite WordPress installation - it's very basic. The reason for the Sitewide Tags/Sitewide Search plugins posting to a master blog is query times in the database. You're not limited to this as a solution, but it does reduce the database load on massive multisite blogs and saves page load times as well on searches. On some sites that I know are limited to five or less blogs I've written plugins that just query across the network as you describe. It's still just a database, and still just PHP - you're not really limited to the WordPress core functionality.
posted by annathea at 3:38 PM on February 2, 2011