WordPress MU

I need the homepage of my WPMU to display the latest posts from all the blogs. I've seen all the plugins that have been recommended, but there are problems with all of them. Most of them only list the title of the post. I need it to look exactly like normal posts would look on the front page: Title, author, date, x words from the post, # of comments, and the sociable plugin links. Essentially, I need it to look the way a regular post does on the front page. This is for a non-profit website, and I'm already past my deadline, so I need a way to do this ASAP. I will give you credit on my website, which I expect to get coverage in the international press.

Thank you so so much for anyone who can help.

Pulling in a sitewide feed, you'll need the plugin, and then using that to display the posts would work.

Use the feed layout of the wp-admin index-extra.php to see how it can be customized/used.

Hi lunabyte, and thanks for the reply.

I added the plugin for the feed and you can see the feed here:

http://www.theworldblog.org/wpmu-feed/

Now I need to integrate that into the homepage, but it needs to have any embedded photos or videos too. Also, I'm not exactly sure what to do with the index-extra.php file. Can I pay you $50 to fix this for me? You sound a lot more competent than I am.

the list-all plugin will do that. i also think you could use simplepie to get the effect you want. to use simplepie, you'll have to hack kses - but its not un-doable.

luna's idea seems like it'll work, but it'd take me longer to figure it out than to pull the feed with RSS and then customize the CSS.

That's what you're doing, actually.

Pulling the feed like in the dashboard (where the actual code to pull the feed is in index-extra), and then just formatting it.

No biggie, really.

Hi guys, thanks for your help.

I have one final problem.

I am using http://www.itdamager.com/plugins/wpmu-sitewide-feed/ for my feed.

The feed http://theworldblog.org/wpmu-feed/ has all I want in it (this is full text mode, not summary) and it ouputs like this: http://theworldblog.org/wp-content/plugins/multifeed/test55.php . The problem is I only want a summary of the post, but the summary does not include the images. What I would like to have a is a feed that looks like this: http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/iraq

So to recap I want a summary of the posts (maybe with a "Read more...") and I want this summary to include the images I include.

Any idea what to do? Seriously I appreciate all your help, so thanks a lot.

As a sidenote, is there no way to have my subdomain blogs post on their subdomains AND also to the main page, rather than using feeds? I feel like this would be a more straightforward approach and I don't see why the MU functionality does not allow this.

Hmmm... you could use one of php's built-in functions to trim the length of the content to a certain number of characters, then provide your own "read more" link.

With all the content there in the feed, now it's just manipulating it to do what you want.

Thanks for the help.

Do you think this is something I, with virtually no php knowledge/experience, could craft, or am I better off paying a freelancer to do it for me?

Look at it as a learning experence. Builds character and all that. :)

Here is a the code for a Plug-in that was custom built for my site that ran an older WPMU version. It worked great and did what you want - rotated posts from blogs onto the home page. Those of you here on the board with PHP expertise could probably modify it easily to work with the latest MU version or beyond.

I make no claims to this code working well or at all just thought I would pass it along. In fact I would love to have it updated to work with the new site!

Anyone, Anyone?

http://pastebin.com/f16b7c19c

"As a sidenote, is there no way to have my subdomain blogs post on their subdomains AND also to the main page, rather than using feeds? I feel like this would be a more straightforward approach and I don't see why the MU functionality does not allow this."

Search for "most recent posts". It's easily adapted to include the post content.