WordPress MU

Ok, this might be a stupid question, but I can't seem to find a clear answer.

I'd like to create a system so that when someone signs up to a blog, they have full creative control over the theme/comments/categories/posting/etc as normal, but there should be constants throughout the blogs. Such as :

* A "Recent Posts" widget or link that has all of the Recent posts from all of the other blogs
* Adsense ads
* Recent Comments from other blogs
* A link to every other blog in the system
* A global blogroll

Etc.

How would I best go about creating something like this?

I've set up a number of Wordpress blogs, and I managed to get MU up and running pretty well, but I don't have any experience in coding or creating/editing script or plugins.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thanks so much

Hardcode it in to the theme sidebars. :)

Hi!

Thanks very much for your reply. I've been searching about the internet for a while without much luck - could someone direct me to some resources on hardcoding RSS feeds?

Thanks!

http://wpmututorials.com/plugins/how-to-display-users-blog-posts-feed-on-your-main-page/

While this pulls the sitewide feed onto the main page, the process is exactly the same if you want a feed hardcoded into a theme's sidebar.

Ok, I've managed to do this. I've even got it working for external RSS feeds, but when I try to use Sitewide feed, I get this error :

Warning: array_slice() [function.array-slice]: The first argument should be an array in /home/yoursite/www/wp-content/themes/oceanmist/sidebar.php on line 44

Line 44 is :

$items = array_slice($feed->items, 0, $maxitems);

Any ideas? I'm so close here !!

Sidenote : outside of this hardcoded RSS feed, the Sitewide RSS feed works just fine.

Andrea I have a question with hard coding the sidebar. Wont this hard coding get overwritten when they place a widget in the sidebar? Is there a way to create a widget enable sidebar but keep items hard coded such has advertising?

Yes, in a widget enabled sidebar there will be an if statement along the lines of:
if(widgets)
do widgets
else
do hardcoded
end if

Change this to
if(widgets)
do widgets
end if
do hardcoded

How would I go about hardcoding a widget or plugin into the sidebar?

Would I just use a PHP include call? If so do I just call the main file within the plugin? I mean exactly what gets called when you place a widget in the sidebar the normal way?

Thanks for any help