WordPress MU

OK, I think you guys would have to agree with me that http://www.wurk.net is probably the best site making use of WP MU.

How would I go about setting up something similar?

... it would be sweet if he offered his theme up for the community.

What I'm after is the ability for users to setup their own blogs on my network, but also to be able to crawl feeds of other blogs, and allow bloggers and article writers the ability to submit their posts (if they either don't use an RSS feed, or they haven't yet submitted their RSS feed).

But then what I want to be able to do is select which posts from those submitted posts/articles/feeds will be displayed on the front page.

So basically like a slashdot, but targetting a specific niche and having mainly blog feeds fuel the content.

How would I set this up in a short period of time?

What plugins, themes etc would I need?

Is there something better than WP MU that can do what I'm after?

cheers all
nathan

Something better? Not that I know of. :)

First, get WPMU working. That is indeed the first and hardest challenge.

That theme looks a lot like the Kiwi theme.
http://no.oneslistening.com/kiwi
Actually, I'm seeing a lot of new themes out there with a similar layout.
(like Hemingway http://warpspire.com/hemingway/ or Hemingway Reloaded.)
Then use ITDamager's WPMU Sitewide feed plugin. There's that and other ways to pull latest whatever to the front page.

"But then what I want to be able to do is select which posts from those submitted posts/articles/feeds will be displayed on the front page."

If you mean read over all the recent posts, then pick the best ones to highlight, then that's a manual job. Pick the ones you think are best, then write a post about it on the main blog.

Guess only Barry can answer that question. Lol..

I do have to admit that wurk does look pretty nice. He has a lot of functions and has tied the entire network together into a nice package.
If I could only focus my idea and then pull it together as well as he has done.
A quick design question for anybody who would like to answer. Historically, when designing sites we used to keep screen sizes in mind, 640 x 480, 600 x 800 and up and up. I noticed that work is pretty wide, are people still concerned with screen size, download times etc. Or are things like this being thrown to the wind??/

Not thrown to wind, but it's not as big a concern. You don't have to go smaller than 800x600 these days, and unless pics are huge, it doesn't seem to be much of an issue.

Clean code still rules though.

Heya guys. Thanks for the comments here - I really appreciate what you're saying. ;o)

I'm not sure I could offer the theme up because it's been put together specifically for what I'm doing with the network, and while it is mainly MU powered, there's also a bunch of other bespoke stuff going on, so turning it into an installable theme may be more hassle than it's actually worth.

I can tell you how I got there, though, if it helps...

The network also includes independent blogs that are not powered by my install of MU, or even hosted by me. So, that means the 'latest entries from around the network' section of the wurk.net front page needs to include both my MU blogs and the independent blogs.

So what I've done here is to build a really simple feed aggregator out of simplepie.org, some sticky tape, and some old toilet roll tubes, that caches the feeds from any blog in the network (MU or otherwise) and displays them in the timeline format I have going on there.

The directory in the footer is easy. I've just slotted another table into the DB that holds the metadata (URL, feed URL, and some theme specific stuff) for each blog in the network, and I build the directory from that.

The individual network blog theme (all the *.wurk.net blogs run off of one theme) also pulls specific info from this table, depending on the blog itself.

For the network wide search, all I did was tap into the search API of a major search engine - again, because I wanted to search both MU and independent blogs. The only trade off is that your pages must be indexed by the search engine before they show up, but it's nice to let someone else do the hard work there.

All pretty simple, really. There's still some tidying up to do (isn't there always?), but I'll get round to it sooner or later.

;o)

B

Great reply! I have a few questions for ya.

For the MU setups that doesn't have to independent blogs, there is no need to use SimplePie right?

Regarding the timeline format, you mentioned that you were using an elapsed from a website. How did you implement it that it integrates so well with MU? I tried but it keeps getting errors. Would love that feature on my latest updated blog list.

Could you explain more about it? I am intending to sort all my blogs into different categories automactically. How does your directory sort each blog into different category? Eg. management, education etc...

Many questions that have left me pondering. :)) Thanks barry!

Wow, thanks Barry.

I've also got a few more short questions...

How do you add an external blog to the network?

Any chance of releasing the code for the simplepie hack you developed? (i.e. the one that displays both internal and external feed updates)

cheers
nathan

anyone?

So what I've done here is to build a really simple feed aggregator out of simplepie.org, some sticky tape, and some old toilet roll tubes, that caches the feeds from any blog in the network (MU or otherwise)

What I think he means by adding them to his network, he is adding the feed to his aggregator, which then gets displayed on the main page. I remember reading another forum topic about that, but I cannot remember who or when it was.

ah, so basically just setup a like a bloglines account or simplepie and manually subscribe to feeds, and then add that whole feed to your page?

can u share with us the Featured site! function and the last headlines function

sorry to bump this topic, but can someone told me which lugin allow user to custom their own template please ?

Thanks by advance :)

Cédric

In addition to Barry's explanation here's a nice tutorial by someone who's done exactly the same thing from the looks of it:
http://www.bioneural.net/2006/07/01/baking-simplepie-with-favicon-topping/
Ducktaping something like that together should get us a lot closer to the 'portal'look 'n feel.

Toucouleur, haven't seen a solution for this yet. The themes are meant to be shared among users on the server. We don't even have editing themes over at WP.com.

You may want to read this interview that Andy did a bit ago on the subject.

thanks mike for having spent your time to answer, I finnaly get a way to search on : http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=819&replies=37#post-4349

thanks for being so patient with newbies like I am.

Best regards :)

Hmm, hadn't seen that before. Glad you found it.

-drmike