Unusual Configuration in Worpress

April 17, 2007 10:32 PM

WordPress Filter: Multiple blogs in one?

I'm currently running an old release of Movable Type, and have a somewhat unusual, but perfect, setup. Basically, about a dozen people each have their own blogs in Movable Type, with their own username and blog. However, I have the front page configured as an "aggregate" of all the posts, sorted by time, regardless of author.

How do I do this in Wordpress? Is there an extension that makes this possible/easy? It's simple for me to have multiple users share a single blog, and it's easy for me to have multiple users each have their own blog, but, with the current setup, I have it both ways. I want to do it in Wordpress, too.

posted by fogster to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Yet Multiple users share a single blog sounds exactly like what you want to do... they log in as an author, post to their blog, and watch as each author page becomes their specific "blog" while the blog page is the multi-blog aggregate you desire. Certainly you know you can customize the templates to make it look and act the way you wish. I do this with mu, so mine has the added wrinkle of multiple separate multi-author/blog aggregates.
posted by thejoshu at 10:42 PM on April 17, 2007

It's important that each author also have their 'own' blog. Is this something I can do 'natively' or with a simple extension, or does it involve a lot of customization?

The thing is that I'm trying to avoid making extensive modifications to things because part of the problem with my current setup is that, as time went on, I kept hacking the code and bolting things on until I no longer have the slightest clue how anything works, even though I've written half of it by now.

I hadn't seen mu, though!
posted by fogster at 10:54 PM on April 17, 2007

There are a few ways to do this. Above, as thejoshu says, would be super easy — one installation of Wordpress, a few tweaks to the template to create user pages, and you're done. (User pages, by the way, look a lot like category pages — instead of showing all the posts from a certain category they display the posts from a certain user. Each page's template can be customized for a unique look.

You could also have one main site, and install multiple Wordpress blogs in sub-categories, like yoursite.com/bob, yoursite.com/susie, etc. You'd then have to install a plugin to aggregate these posts on the main page.

Finally, you can use Wordpress MU but I would advise against it, as the documentation for MU versus regular Wordpress seems to be really lacking.
posted by Brittanie at 10:58 PM on April 17, 2007

install multiple Wordpress blogs in sub-categories sub-directories
posted by Brittanie at 10:59 PM on April 17, 2007

You can also mod_rewrite the URLs to give different blogs their individual feel.

so ... aliceblog.com and bobsblog.com both go to the same place, but then with mod_rewrite you turn any requests for aliceblog.com into groupblog.com/user/alice ...

The nice thing about WP is that there are tons of plugins and there isn't much functionality that can't be altered with a plugin if you need to hack something together yourself.
posted by SpecialK at 11:10 PM on April 17, 2007

In addition, I would suggest you visit the Wordpress Suppport Forums to research this. It's a question that comes up often there and you may find some ideas.

I still think the easiest way to do this is to install one wordpress at the root level of your site to act as the main blog, then multiple Wordpresses (?) into separate sub-directories, each directory acting as it's own blog. Then, on the main page, use a WP aggregator plugin (see here) to pull the posts you want.

Additionally, the latest WP release allows you to make a static page your home page, so it would be easy to create a static page for the feeds and then direct the home page to that static page.
posted by Brittanie at 11:31 PM on April 17, 2007

I would partially agree with Brittanie.

You could install mu, have a limitless number of blogs on one install, and then install an aggregator plugin for blog #1 (the main blog that gets installed when you install the mu sw), so that viewers loading that page get what you're looking for.

This seems like a thread to look into.

I wouldn't worry about sparse mu documentation. It's 99% straight wordpress, and either way there's a big community.
posted by thejoshu at 12:00 AM on April 18, 2007

I do something sort of similar on my website (Here's a really tiny link). I use Planet as an aggregator for my blog, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Last.fm feeds, and present them as though they were all one stream. It's got some shortcomings I live with, and others that I've coded around, but it was essentially created for the purpose that you need it for.
posted by Plutor at 6:34 AM on April 18, 2007

As others have pointed out, it sounds like you need Wordpress MU -- if I'm understanding your question correctly, this is what it's designed for. I'm doing some freelance work on a site right now which fits yours description and uses WPMU as a backend.

Be warned that it's still a bit buggier than it should be at this stage (IMO) and you may need to find a hack or plugin to get the consolidated listing of posts to display according to the criteria you want (then again, you may not). But I think you'll be pretty happy with what it can do right out of the box.
posted by treepour at 8:27 AM on April 18, 2007