ETC@BMC

aharding January 6th, 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.

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