Aggregating Recent Posts to Parent Site in Multisite Install

Maybe take a look at adding BuddyPress on top of your multi-site network? With that, you can go further with an “Activity stream” showing latest posts, comments and more. Other widgets can be used to show who’s currently, or was recently, online. I use it this way at edubuzz.org.

There used to be stand-alone widget for exactly this, but they are in need of updating.

I have one on the way.

Here’s one easy, albeit not super-efficient way:

Drag an rss widget for each site into the sidebar (or any widgetized area in your theme) and enter its feed url.

Get each site’s feed url by clicking on the rss icon displayed on the site and copying the resulting url from the location bar.

If you don’t see an rss icon (and for more info on feeds) read this:
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/WordPress_Feeds#Finding_Your_Feed_URL

@rbickett
Try this theme. It might work for you in conjunction with raskull’s RSS concept. I, too, am looking for a ‘portal’ to my network of blogs.
https://bavotasan.com/downloads/feed-me-seymour-free-wordpress-theme/
https://themes.bavotasan.com/our-themes/basic-themes/feed-me-seymour/

Magazine themes make great portals.

If you do use rss, you might want to speed up the cache clearing, otherwise new posts might take quite a while to appear. Put this in your functions file:

// speed up rss cache -- 1800 seconds = 1/2 hour
add_filter( 'wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', create_function('$fixrss', 'return 1800;') )

Thanks raskull ??

Wow! Thanks to everyone for the great suggestions!

Yeah, same thing here. I’m wanting the main content of my parent site to pull a list of the most recent posts from several (all) child sites. When I mean posts, I mean it in the context of “news articles” written on the child sites.

The idea here is the parent site is like a county page and the child sites are like a town. When someone posts to any town I need the parent/county page to display the recent posts made from all of the towns, not just one (so I don’t think the rss thing will work here).

I guess the parent could be coded with php to fetch the recent articles but since each “city” has its own table, and there could be 200 cities, this makes for a long db query. Seems this feature would be the main purpose of the multisite feature?

(This gets into another issue, displaying on the parent site a list of current events retrieved from child calendars.)

Any ideas?

You can use as many rss widgets as you want — one for each town. Each widget lets you choose up to 20 posts from the town site. (I should mention these are post titles, with links, not the post content.)

However that is just a quick and dirty solution. But it’s not too hard to use other rss aggregation tools to do this more efficiently.

For calendars, you might look into giving each town a google calendar, then merging the rss feeds from the calendars. Then use the google calendar api to display the events (there are plugins that do this).

@ raskull
Are you (or anyone else) aware of such an aggregator?
Ideally (IMHO) it would have to pick the excerpt with an image from the latest network posts from each site(blog) and display them grouped by blog or even better mixed in a descending time order linking to the original post.
Thanx

You could google for rss aggregator widgets and plugins, but I’ve had the best luck starting from scratch using SimplePie.

SimplePie also offers SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which I haven’t tried.

There’s a product mentioned in this thread, but I don’t know anything about it.

This freshly baked plugin might help too: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/diamond-multisite-widgets/

There is a difference between using rss to pull the content and querying the database of the multisite install.

I myself am hoping to get more information about the advisability of and alternatives to querying the database if you have a large number of blogs.

The plugin above, and all the others I’ve seen, use the function get_blog_list, which has been deprecated for its “suicidal” tendencies.

I will start a new thread on that.

I hear you both.
I would love the result dgilmour but would am not “suicidal”. ??
I will give it atry at a test site but this would have no more than 10 blogs or so.

@ raskull: Please post the link to the thread here so we could follow.
Thanx