WordPress MU

I want to have the Admin site be able to post an item to all blogs? It could be on the index page or if anyone has done this using a new page or template....Anyone already done this?

Not out of the box. You could probably write up a script or plugin that allowed you to do it though.

Silly question - but why would you want to post into every single blog on your system?

There is a plugin that allows you to add messages to your users dashboard - but they are not posts.

I've got a script that posts posts to the main blog and to other "group" blogs. If you want to post to every blog and you have lots of blogs it would require a lot of time to add a post to every blog. I guess you could add the post at the next time it was viewed -- or you merge the post into the post loop via a plugin without actually adding to the post list. If you did it this way then the users wouldn't be able to delete the post. Maybe that is a consideration as well.

Richard

Or just post to the main admin blog, and have the dashboard modified so it shows the feed from the main blog.

Presto, everyone on the system sees your post on their dashboard.

I've done something somewhat similar by creating new page templates & telling WPMU to load them in every blog addition to the "loop" templates in your theme. Not sure if this is exactly what you meant:

In short, one way to get WPMU to load a custom sitewide "non-post" template, you can utilize the 'template_redirect' action, and $wp_query->get('name'). For example, we made a function called "my_pages_catch", it checks if there is a template name in your theme that matches $wp_query->get('name'), and if so passes it thru.

You include the header & footer templates before & after & you're off. You can either "hardcode" the link into your sidebar/navbar or if you have multiple pages that you want to appear across the boards, make a special loop.

To add an admin page to your menu to edit the contents, it gets a little more involved, but it's certainly possible. The "dirty" way would be to edit the content in that template file, like a regular ol fashioned html include, but you probably want something that's easier for an admin to edit.

There may be better methods, it took me a while to figure this one out. If there isn't already an existing plugin, maybe I'll take a whack at packaging what I've done as a "global page" plugin.

Not sure if that's more involved than what you're going for :-)

@SteveAtty - the blog is a set of regional franchise operations all under the MU umbrella. The main blog wants to post newsletter and products posts under the sub-blog...mainly so visitors don't have to look in two places for news updates, etc.

@mysorehead & andrea_r - the intent is to get in front of the regional visitors and not necessarily the admins...but I might try to get messages on the Dashboard.

@rickybrennanjr - what you said makes sense. All the sub-blogs use the same theme so it would be easier to manage an additional template. The only other thought we had right now was to password protect a PAGE...but with over 150 sub-blogs it would be too difficult to manage updates. Need a central way to update them. For the admin I would build or want something that Blog_id=1 can manage on the wp-admin site. Is that what you've done? I'd gladly work with you to re-package this into a plugin. Let me know. Regards. ;)

samnewberry - definitely a similar idea, although having just recently upgraded to 1.2.3, I'm actually going to revisit how I do some of the stuff we do. when I have some time I'll dig in & get back to ya.

Although actually if I'm understanding you, it sounds like for what you're going for, what you could do is just create the "Page" content in the main blog, and in your custom "sitewide" template, just grab from wp_1_posts ? Unless I'm oversimplifying? Heck, make a separate blog dedicated to your "sitewide" posts content, and just pull from there, I do stuff like that all the time too.

I also really like the idea of being able to use the 'post_type' field to specify a "custom" page type, say "sitewide" for example.

(I know this sort of falls into making WPMU do things it's not supposed to do, but that's part of the fun :-)

Cheers!

Actually it's fairly easy to do with a simple script.

Anyone achieved this? I need to this too...

A simple script that cycles through your blog numbers and uses the add_post function to insert a post into the blog would do it.

I'm wondering about this same thing. We are a nonprofit HQ with member blogs representing local units throughout the state. We've just set up each individual blog with a basic three pages, and want to do one post for each before rolling it out to the units sub-admins. It's like the "First Post" for new blogs, but we didn't take into account populating that post with what we want for each... so... is there an easy way to do this?

Hiya,
Just wondering if anyone found a solution and/or developed a plugin for this?
- Rebecca

I was actually working on this with a coder but he couldn't get it to work.

I know I asked this question and I got some response for some plugins that would help with this type of situation.

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=11429

I am also using this to plan a redirect to the actual post, so there wouldn't be duplicate content, but with the same intentions of navigation.