WordPress MU

I am building a network of blogs (one site with many blogs below it) and all blogs have to share certain static pages, such as terms & conditions, privacy policy, admin contact, etc. To make maintenance easier I would really like to maintain these pages in one place. Also, when launching new blogs the pages must exist immediately.

Here’s an example using folders for the blogs:

http://example.com = main blog where I hope to define the pages that have to appear on all blogs.

http://example.com/veggies/ = sub-blog1
http://example.com/seafood/ = sub-blog2

There might be unique pages defined in the sub-blogs eventually, but so far I don't even need that - all pages are common to all blogs.

Is there any way to do this? Happy to pay someone for consulting time if there's no standard plugin or obvious solution.

I hope this question is making sense. Thanks much for any help.

This should help get you closer anyway...not sure if a plugin exists yet...

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=5885

http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/blog-templates

Thanks for the useful pointers. These are good information, but neither one addresses my situation. I don't want to create individual pages for each blog - doing that would mean editing 100 individual pages whenever I have to change a privacy policy, or contact form in the future.

I'm trying to get several pages of each blog to point at the same content so that I can edit text in one place and have it appear immediately on every existing blog, as well as new blogs created in the future.

Maybe the easy way to accomplish this is to use the blog-template plugin to create the pages I need. But in those pages use a PHP require() or include() function call to grab the boilerplate content from a text file. Anyone have a better idea?

You could add links in the theme header, right in the menu, to the pages you want everyone to have in their menu. If you add them after the blogs own pagemenu they should follow any locally created menuitems, sending people to the pages you want to include links to naturally.
Don't know if its the best way but it works ok.

xrun, I understand that I can hard code any link into the menu, but then they "leave" the blog. That's not good.

These pages need to look like any other page, with all the navigation, graphics, etc. in place.

What you're asking for is really quite complex custom coding.

Take a look at how the terms of service plugin is written. That might point you in the right direction. (Although, personally, I don't like the fact that it's done with text files - makes file permissions sort of a PITA.)

andrea_r - If it was easy I wouldn't need help :)

DeannaS - Not sure what sort of PITA you mean. In my case at least the content of the pages I need won't change very often, and nobody besides the main site administrator will be allowed to touch them, so using text files doesn't seem like any problem at all.

Which terms of service plugin should I be looking at? I found something at:

http://ozblog.com.au/2008/09/20/wordpress-terms-of-use-plugin/

The documentation says you can put a tag on any page to load the text file (which is exactly what I need) but I don't see anything in the code that would make that work. Besides that, it keeps displaying the new user login and welcome pages even after I agree to the terms - it won't stop bothering me. So I this looks like a dead end.

I found another one here:

http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/terms-of-service

That one requires me to pay a $50 membership fee, which I did. I got a password via e-mail about an hour ago, but I still can't log in.

If there are others let me know where to look.

It's the ozblog one, which works well for me - and what I mean about PITA is that when you add the add the plugin, you have to go in and change permissions on the text files (or at least we do with our configuration). Not a huge deal, but I don't like having that extra step.

I didn't mean it would solve all your problems, but it could be a template for how to go about doing what you need to do.

I'm looking for the same solution. I came across this plugin, but it doesn't work in WPMU 2.7:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cross-post/

I wasn't able to test it to see if it works for Pages as well as posts.

I take that last comment back. It works in 2.7 but only for posts. If this only worked for Pages...