Autoblog posts in wpms(network) into main site including featured images

  • I’ve a scenario like this:

    • Blog writers, write their content into their blog and whichever post that they’d like to be seen in the main site should include the category ‘Featured’ (they’re trustworthy!)
    • the ‘featured category’ posts from each blog are gathered in a category named as the blog’s name in the main site
    • All the categories of the main site are shown in the main site’s page and the posts are linked to their own blog” ( except for the posts of the main blog itself )
    • A slider shows the latest posts of the entire network on top of the main blog

    My first question is: “What’s your suggestion for this scenario?“

    I’ve used Auto-blogging for this scenario and have tested many plugins. The problem of auto-blogging plugins with this scenario is the Slider part.

    Slider needs the thumbnail and in wp thumbnail can’t be a url, it should be an attachment id. so auto-blogging or aggregation plugins download the first image of the post and attach it to the post so every time a post is pulled to the main site the featured image is duplicated.

    so the second question: If Auto-blogging or aggregation is the solution, is there one that hasn’t this problem?

    I’ve googled and searched nearly everywhere but no similar questions.

    I’ll appreciate any suggestion for this scenario. thanks in advance

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • I would use the following plugin to do most of what I think you are after:

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/

    You can set it to dupe every post from every site in your network to the main blog. All posts link back to the originating blog making it somewhat automagical that the posts are duped.

    Once the content is aggregated on the main blog, you should be able to use all the usual WordPress trickery to display special categories, sliders, recent posts lists, whatever.

    Someone else will have to chime in if they have jiggered this plugin to display featured images vs “Include Post Thumbnails”, I don’t use featured images on my sites so I don’t know if the plugin can be jiggered to cope with that. Look at the support forums for this plugin, as it is a feature discussed in some of its threads.

    Donncha’s plugin has this code:

    if( get_sitewide_tags_option( 'tags_blog_thumbs' ) && ( $thumb_id = get_post_meta( $post->ID, '_thumbnail_id', true ) ) ) {
		$thumb_size = apply_filters( 'sitewide_tags_thumb_size', 'thumbnail' );
		$global_meta['thumbnail_html'] = wp_get_attachment_image( $thumb_id, $thumb_size );
	}

    Perhaps that alone will confirm for you that this plugin is or isn’t what you are looking for.

    Thread Starter mahdionnet

    (@mahdionnet)

    thanks for your answers,
    Of course I’ve checked wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags. but the problem is that it doesn’t fetch featured images!
    So :
    1-Is there any other solutions?
    if not: 2- How can I integrate fetched posts with the slider?
    thanks for your answers in advance

    ps:Unfortunately I’m not very familiar with the difference between featured image and thumbnail image, and how can I make the template or slider use which one of them

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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