Combining content from multiple blogs on a page

  • I am looking for a way to combine content from multiple blogs on a single page.
    I am currently running several independent blogs, all on wordpress and all sharing a common database with different table prefixes. I now want to create a separate, page which acts as a sort of super-directory, including headlines and other content from all of the others. To do this, i want to be able to use the existing wordpress functions and plugins, but change the database to which they refer – all in the same page. I have tried a few hacks that I could think of, (ie including the wp-blog_header.php file again, changing the $table_prefix variable, etc.)but so far with no success.
    Does anyone have any ideas? Has anyone done this before? – Thanks

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • I believe you can use the RSS feeds from the different blogs to consolidate them into a single page. This has been discussed before, please do a search.
    Regards

    CG-FeedRead
    https://www.chait.net/index.php?p=238

    Thread Starter robgreeley

    (@robgreeley)

    I am currently using RSS feeds in this way (with magpie, not CG-FeedRead). This solution is klunky and not very flexible, since you are limited to only the information and formats that are in RSS.
    What I am trying to do is find a way to use the wordpress functions, but direct them to different databases – hence this posted question.
    Thank you again if anyone has a solution.
    And no, thank you, 90 minutes of searching for things like “combine content from multiple blogs on a single page” brings up no relevant results…

    I had that functionality when I was running several blogs through MovableType. Searched the web and could find only one site with more than a passing mention of the topic:
    https://www.netlexfrance.com/wordpress/index.php?p=173
    This is somewhat easy to provide in a multi-blog system like MT. For WordPress, as it lacks anything like that right now, a plugin or hack would need to bypass WP’s functions and connect directly to the WP database (or in this case, the database of each blog), cull post tables from each into an array, sort or otherwise organize to your desire, then output them. In other words, you’re recreating the loop process as a superloop. It’d be like a mini, multi-blogging version of WordPress in a plugin, at least in regards to reading your site.
    Not impossible, but certainly not a trivial piece of work. At least with WP as it is.

    Thread Starter robgreeley

    (@robgreeley)

    I ended up going the feed reader route (integrating the RSS feeds from multiple blogs into a page. After playing with magpie for a while, I used cg_feedread.
    The resulting page is slow to load, and somewhat lacking in functionality. It also has problems with curly quotations and other such symbols – wordpress passes them through in the RSS feed, but the feedreaders don’t recognize them, displaying instead a set of symbols (ie “It’s” becomes “It?￠a??a?￠s”)

    Damn. Is there a way to do this without RSS? I’d really be interested in finding a better solution.

    I am going to be running into the same problem pretty soon with a project i am working on, but i think i may work around it by using different categories and then running the loop multiple times, but i was also thinking if there was a way that you could set up a page outside of wordpress that included the indexes of your different blogs and then set up those indexes to work together and with your main index to create the aggregated page. To try and make that more clear, You would create a page and in the space that you want the most recent entry from a certain blog to show up you would include that blog’s index, and you would tweak that template to just output the latest entry. Then you would do the same for the rest of the blogs. You could even write some more complex code to deal with variable you could pass to make the index output a certain way. I don’t know all the ins and outs of wordpress so I may be way off with this method, but it is just a thought.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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