Wordpress blogs "Central Command" Solution?

September 29, 2011 5:09 AM

Seeking recommendations for dealing with many Wordpress sites from one central location. I have a number of personal sites, plus work related sites, and would like a secure, central way to deal with them all – plus a wishpony that is probably not even a spark in some stallion's eye...

I'll see things I'd like to add to one or another site, but won't take the time to find the admin login url, try to remember the user name and password and then log in, navigate to add a new post, etc.

So, basically, I end up posting to, and updating work sites, but not others because it's just too much trouble to constantly log in and out and deal with navigating.

I've found one for-pay service that claims to do this, but I don't know anything about it. I would be willing to pay what they are asking, which is about $5 per month for around the number of sites I'm mainly dealing with – if it was a very helpful, non-buggy, secure thing. (Secure is important, because some sites are just mine, and some belong to people I work for).

Also, in my dream of dreams, I would have a bookmarklet or right-click option that would allow me to post the current page – with a drop-down (or similar) menu of all sites, and I could pick which site to post it to.

Have any of you found reasonable solutions to this sort of problem?

posted by taz to computers & internet (10 answers total)

Migrate them all to a Multisite (network mode) installation.
posted by djb at 5:27 AM on September 29, 2011

that's not possible, djb... different clients with their sites on different servers.
posted by taz at 5:30 AM on September 29, 2011

Spotted this related question with recommendations of ScribeFire (and others). Probably too simple for what you need (posting to multiple blogs, but not management per se). Not sure.

Are you currently in the habit of keeping good, clear, accurate records for all the sites you manage, and is this information easy to access, search/sort and discover? Just asking because it seems storing this info in a nice password vault like KeePass would make it relatively painless to find when needed. But this isn't the answer you're looking for.

Also consider the browser-based password manager LastPass. This would let you not only store the passwords for each site (in the cloud, highly secured), but also enable your browser to auto-login to each unique site without having to do a thing.
posted by sprocket87 at 5:55 AM on September 29, 2011

I'm guessing the paid for service is ManageWP, not used it myself a few friends seem to love it.
posted by Z303 at 5:59 AM on September 29, 2011

ManageWP does exactly what you want. I use it to do the same thing you're looking to do, and love it.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 6:01 AM on September 29, 2011

That is the service I googled up, Z303, and chrisfromthelc.

I happened to come across it just in advance of their public launch, so I was a bit worried that it would look like astroturfing if I mentioned this service specifically. I've absolutely never heard of them until searching today, but am very interested in this kind of info.
posted by taz at 6:18 AM on September 29, 2011

A potential two-pronged approach:
1) Collect individual 'Post this' bookmarklets for each site, sort them into a single subfolder in your favorites menu. When you want to post something, go to Favorites, PostThis, then the specific site.

2) Establish an OpenID provider, and install the OpenID plugin on each of the WP installs that you manage. Link each WP account with your OpenID account, so you can use a single login/password for everything.

I have a SimpleID install I use as my provider, but there are many others. Wordpress/Google/Yahoo/LiveJournal/etc all are (or can be) set up as providers, and companies like Verisign will sell you two-factor authentication, so you can make this as secure as you want. Essentially, you just need some central place to log in to.
posted by yuwtze at 6:49 AM on September 29, 2011

@taz, they have free beta accounts right now. Sign up and try it out.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 7:05 AM on September 29, 2011

If I'm understanding the question correctly, you need Windows Live Writer. You set up multiple blogs in it, then put checkboxes next to the one(s) each post publishes to.
posted by jbickers at 9:04 AM on September 29, 2011

thanks, guys. jbickers, I'm afraid I'm still on XP on this notebook I use, and the Windows Live Writer is for Windows 7, though I'll have a look at that when I finally transition.

Chrisfromthelc, thanks; I've signed up to try out the service. I'll come back with more info once I've had a chance to try it out.
posted by taz at 4:22 PM on September 29, 2011