Getting member blog posts on the main page
Posted by andrea in I’ve answered this one quite a few times in the past couple of weeks and realized that I don’t have a posts specifically for this subject. It’s buried in other posts. 
There are a few different ways to pull in these posts, and none of them are theme issues. They are done entirely with plugins. Of course, I have a couple of favorites, and your mileage may vary, depending on how you want to present the posts.
AHP Sitewide Recent posts – this plugin goes in the mu-plugins folder and has a template tag that you need to paste in your main blog’s theme file. Usually in the home.php, if there is one. This is good if you just want a brief list, maybe with an excerpt. As an added bonus, you can also show the users’ Gravatar. It can be easily adapted to use a local avatar if you use one of the many avatar plugins around.
This plugin will not show in the plugins list and does not create a menu in the backend. It’s purely one for adding code to your template.
Maybe you want a small box of recent posts, but are wary of messing around with code. Ada A Blog Recent Posts Widget does a similar thing, but in a widget. Then you can place it anywhere in your theme that is widgetized. You wil only see this plugin in your widgets area.
Both of these plugins step through the database and are just fine on smaller sites. If you have a larger site, lots of traffic, and need way more flexibility, then we get to my all-time fave, Sitewide Tags. The plugin name is a bit of a misnomer, as it was originally was for setting up sitewide tags, but the way it does so means it can be used for so much more. Donncha, the main dev for wordpressmu, developed this plugin for the community in what little spare time he has.
Basically, this plugin creates a separate tags blog. It makes a copy of each blog post on the entire system and puts it in this blog. From there, the visitor can search, pick tags, find common categories and more. The posts themselves link back to the originating blog.
With a small change to this plugin’s options, found under Site Admin -> Options, way at the bottom, you can direct it to use the main blog. The main blog will still function as a blog. We’ve used it this way on HomeschoolJournal. Then, we can use the single blog widget like Search and Recent posts to find global content – because it’s reproduced in one blog.
A couple of minor tweaks may also be desired. While sitewide tags pulls the posts, it does not pull the comments count or custom fields. Here’s a forum thread to help with the custom fields. And here’s a post to help with getting the sitewide comments.
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Thanks for the links to the mods of Sitewide Tags, Andrea!
I’ve been meaning to install Sitewide Tags on a sub-blog to test this out.
Thanks again!
Thanks for the article Andrea.
I have been using Site Wide Tags for about a week now and it works very well. The only problem is that it does not pull in posts that were added before the plugin was installed. Do you know of any way to pull in old posts without manually updating each post?
I like the execution of the Sitewide Tags on HomeSchoolJournal. It looks great!
I think it would be nice to be able to display the Blog’s Title alongside the author. Has anyone found a way to do that? Guess I’d better go google that…
I can see you wrote about it
! You are such a godsend.
Trying HARD to get the global blog to work on my WPMU, but nothing is showing up… I can’t find any detailed tutorial on this online
i tried to use AHP Sitewide Recent posts. but i don have any home.php im usinh thesis theme for wpmu. can anybody tell me what is the easy solution to show userrecent post on my main page?
How do I put categories on my home page for the site wide blogs?
It depends – do you mean display the category the post was posted in, or group the blogs themselves by category?
First, I would like to group all new post from all blogs on my bpress mainsite under their posting categories. So to have a sitewide, global, categories aggregator for all posts.
Second I would like to be able to categories all blogs.
It would be nice with heirarch categories.
do you do web development?
do you do any web development. I’m trying to get a site wide category posting on the front page.
What about going the other way, say you want to put posts from the main site onto a child site. Is there an easy way to do that?
I am creating a site using wordpress mu and have implemented sitewide tags and it seems to work.
There is only one problem. I create a post in one of the blogs and include an image in the post but the image does not appear in the listing of aggregated posts on the main site homepage. I realise it is possible to include a gravitar however this is not what I need.
Is there a plugin I can use that will work in conjunction with sitewide tags to achieve the above or do I need to include specific code?