Wordpress Mu Dynamic frong page-BMC style
January 6, 2008
I’ve been working on getting Wordpress Mu up and running for Bryn Mawr. It’s been up since the summer, running mostly on an experimental basis. One thing that I wanted to get working was creating a dynamic front page that pulled posts from all the blogs. Between not having the time and not being too good at coding, I just couldn’t make it happen. I’ve had Jim Groom’s (of UMW fame) post on how he created his front page bookmarked forever. I bucked some of his advice and still managed to get the front page working. I still have some work to do, sprucing up the sidebar and whatnot, but at least I’m now pulling all the posts to the front page.
Here’s how I did it. First, I took Jim’s advice and installed Userthemes, a plugin that I think will be useful all the way around. Instead of creating a separate front page and following his instructions there, I simply added the BDP RSS code to the main page template of my userthemes template. It’s very important that you first copy the them to your userthemes folder using the admin panel for that. Otherwise you’ll write over the main template page that everyone uses. There are a couple of downsides to this method. One, if you post to the main blog, it will appear after the feed posts. Since I’m not planning to post, this isn’t a huge deal for me. But I may move to Jim’s page method later. Right now, I don’t think anyone’s going to pay much attention to the lone post at the bottom of the page. The other downside is that you have to edit the main index page, which makes some people nervous. But it is a quick way of doing things.
The next bit of advice I ignored was not to use the sitewide feed plugin with BDP RSS Aggregator. Jim said it would choke. It didn’t on mine, but I suppose it could at some point, so I’ll keep an eye out for that.
I’m very happy with the results for now and am looking forward to seeing more posts appear on the front page.
Posted in blogging, wordpress mu
content rss
January 6th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
This looks great!
January 6th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Laura, this looks absolutely faaaabulous.
January 7th, 2008 at 2:50 am
Laura,
That looks great, extremely clean-an aggregator blog makes total sense for the front page. And, as always, bucking a lot of my advice is always a good idea
Go Bryn Mawr go!
January 11th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Very, very nice! Congratulations, Laura!
January 12th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Jim,
I’m thinking about going back to your advice about creating a separate templated page, but this works for now. I certainly couldn’t have done this without all your hard work to build on.
February 6th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
The new front page looks great Laura.
February 21st, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Really like the new setup.
February 29th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Thank you so much for sharing this — I’m really surprised how many broken plugins/hacks there are to do this on older versions (and I’m even more surprised how often this comes up that there isn’t a bulletproof FAQ somewhere and/or that there isn’t a simple checkbox somewhere ion WPMU to turn the first blog into an aggregator blog). Now that I know enough to be dangerous, I have a quick question: how did you create the “previous entries” link at the bottom of the page? I don’t quite grasp that part of this trick (I need to figure out where to find the RSS feed that BDP generates, too). If you could hit me with a cluestick, I’d greatly appreciate it (and so would my institution).
April 19th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Hey Dan,
Actually the aggregated RSS feed that BDP RSS creates off of a series of feeds in an output isn’t really documented anywhere, which is annoying. Here is the logic:
http://yourwpmudomain.org/?bdprssfeed=1 (the number corresponds to the ouput format ID of the aggregated feeds you want). Hope this helps, and if it doesn’t shoot me an e-mail at jimgroom_at_gmail.com