WordPress MU

I downloaded wordpressmu and installed it and got things configured nicely and everything seems to work great. The only problem I've run into is what the heck to do with the main wordpress blog. It needs to act as kind of an umbrella of the all of the blogs across the system, so that when readers arrive at the site they kind of get a taste of everything before delving any deeper.

I looked into RSS syndication but there didn't seem to be anything adequately in place to do that, without some major modifications. Then I tried tinkering some with ah-recent-posts-mu plugin, but that will only give me titles of posts, no content preview of any sort. I also thought maybe there was something available to display posts from featured blogs, or featured posts across the system (that'd be good too) but to my dismay there seemed to be nothing.

I only know enough php to tinker with existing code, but really never to write my own, or do major modifications to existing code. I'm a design guy, so I'm out of my element here. But so far in the wordpress software, this is the only problem I've run into that didn't seem to have any kind of plugin-based solution.

Looking through the forums at past discussions about this perplexes me that no one has jumped on it to find a better solution. It seems in relatively high demand. So has anyone come up with some cool solutions for this? Are any of those people extra-kind souls who might be willing to help a dude, out of his comfort zone, with this?

Please, before I commit myself, someone help?

We all crave a unique wordpress theme, who wants to show up at the dance and see their dress already there.

No doubt the newbie mu admin wants to ditch their kubrick home page, but wear it for a while, look at it closely stitch by stitch, notice the form and functions. Small changes do great things. Practice, wreck it, rebuild it. Wear it out before you change it.

Many small fixes or addons come from these forums. Rarely will you find someone willing to share their entire home template...or offer to build yours for you. Don't despair this is normal, here.

Creating your unique home page is not a lot different than creating your own unique theme in a wordpress blog. Once you get your head around the few mu functions for your template you are done. Template functions for wpmu come "from scratch", or trial and error, or indeed "some kind soul".

WPMU admins put a lot of ownership into their home themes. A theme reository for the home page of the site would be neat, but what admin wants to see a bunch of clones of their own site around the net.

Do not despair, ask for small changes, you'll likely get small bits of help.

It would also be a plus if you were to state very specifically what you are trying to do within a sentence or two and then go into detail. From reading your post, I'm at a loss as to what specifically you are asking here.

Sounds like the same question I asked here http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=8360.

And the same old run around. Too much commercial self-interests here. Are they afraid of people leaving their blogsite for others. Doesn't sound likely. Donncha beats himself up and passes the code out free, and those with commercial interests sit on here sniping.

That should be part of the core. You open a book and see a table of contents. Why should a multiblog site be any different?

Thanks for the input dsader. The trouble is that I'm not someone who actually can do a lot of the things your suggesting. At least not without a couple years playing catchup in the coding skill set. In fact, the way things work out of the box is pretty much perfect for my needs, except for this one small thing.

Ddjcbe, all I'm essentially trying to accomplish is a way to replace the main blog with a posts from the other blogs in the network, or all of the posts from the rest of the blogs, or really anything that automatically pulls information from the other blogs so that no one has to maintain the main blog with stuff. Really any viable options are acceptable. I'm not looking for anything too specific.

Wehican, thanks for that link. I went a looked through it and read some of the documentation, it actually looks really useful, but I'm not sure that it quite solves my dilemma here. But to tell you the truth, I was a little perplexed when I found out that something like this wasn't part of the mu core.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how to do what you want, though to me it seems it could get real crowded on the page. Then you also have to determine if you want it by category or random.

An index by category is the easiest way. The admin creates the categories for the site. I would like the users to have to select from a category or subject they wish to base their blog on. Visitors can navigate from there. Something like how a library works.

wehican, there are plugins for that as stated in the other thread.

I really don't think it should be in the core. Many people, as myself, use wpmu for blog sites that are already quite oriented towards one directions, like "dogs", "babies" etc. There is no need for global actegories of blogs here. People that wants that can use the plugin ...

*sigh*

If you want to show post content from all blogs on the front page of your site, it's been discussed over and over again.

We are not hiding it from anyone. Sheesh. Here's my answer again:

Get the sitewide feed plugin. Put it in mu-plugins.
Look at the Dashboard. See the bit where it grabs stuff from the wordpress planet? Copy that code.
paste it in yoor home page template.
Change the feed address to your site's new sitewide feed.

PRESTO.

To get the right answers, you have to:
- ask the right questions
- be brief
- realize this isn't easy stuff and nobody is going to hold your hand & spoon feed most of it
- quit complaining. Those of us who have helped out, the "commercial interests" you reference, have released plenty of free code ourselves and given a LOT of helpful answers.

And a handy tip: I know this stuff because I read the forums, I *read the code* and I tried things. I researched and I knew regular WP inside out. And still there's a steep learning curve. Most of us around here are willing to help people who are willing to work at it.

"Donncha beats himself up and passes the code out free, "

No, he's an employee of Automattic.

Andrea, thanks a ton for that suggestion! I also found that the simplepie rss plugin could take care of alot of the gritty stuff that I don't know how to do and leave it so I only need to mess with divs and CSS.

It looks like that sitewide feed would be really useful also. When it's installed though, it wants a WP Object Cache, which after about an hour of digging I can't seem to find any documentation of, except:
http://ryan.wordpress.com/2005/11/14/persistent-object-cache/

which doesn't actually seem to provide anything except for some technical information. But maybe I just don't speak the language so I'm missing it.

Do you know the solution to the WP Object Caching thing?

It works without it.

Please note that some folks have been reporting problems with the file based object cache that were reported previously when the code was in core. (Do a search on trac to see the discussion.)