donncha's new sitewide plugin

[ZappoMan]

Duh... I'm so out of it that I didn't see this thing earlier... it looks kick ass. Simple, clean, scalable... way better than the crazy solution we had to do before. Plus I can see this being integrated into my "recent posts" solution... etc.. So... all goodness.

But, here's my question now...

Has anyone tried to make the blog created by this plugin to run as a "subdir" while all the other blogs run as vhost.

Today I have:

http://mydomain.com/ -- home page of blog 1
http://mydomain.com/tags/ -- home page of single instance blog doing the old skool tags approach
http://user1.mydomain.com/ -- home page of blog 2 (user1)
http://user2.mydomain.com/ -- home page of blog 3 (user2)
...

It would be sweet if I could replace that old mess and make:
http://mydomain.com/tags/ -- work for donncha's new solution.

Thoughts?

[ron_r]

you could use a page template that was only included in the home theme.

[ZappoMan]

Yep... that's what I was thinking of doing.

[drmike]

I haven't tried the plugin yet (Experience with the cache plugin shows that waiting a version or two maybe something to consider.  Sorry, being honest.) but that was the plan as well.  Create some Page Templates for blog #1, do the switch_to_blog function, and just use the data from the tags blog. 

With the page templates, you also have control over how much content of the post is displayed.

Oh, and make sure the tag blog is marked as private so not to dupe content. 

[ZappoMan]

Yeah, it's kinda interesting, there are some advantages to doing this as a blog... but the more I think about it, there are several disadvantages too...

Clearly from a scalability perspective, doing the hooks on new/edit/delete post, and storing them in a "master" table is a pretty scalable solution. That's the essence of the original site-feed -> autblog -> single instance.

But making it a blog means you need to do extra work to "hide" the blogness of it.

I am looking into eventually building a "friend feed" feature (like wp.com's Blog Surfer) which has many similar characteristics to this... except sitewide could be thought of as the "friend feed for everyone".

Anyway... it's an interesting approach. I don't think I will use it out of the box... but it's clean and short, and a good inspiration for another project.

[ron_r]

@doc - I would parse the feed of the blog instead of the switch to blog thing.

@zap - a quick plugin could redirect to your tags page unless the wp-admin was in the url.

[ZappoMan]

@ron - Really? You wouldn't use switch_to_blog()? Why not... seemed like the logical approach to me.

[ron_r]

Probably 6 of one and a half dozen of the other.

I've done the switch to blog on a page template before and thought it was a bit ugly (code wise).

[drmike]

Probably 6 of one and a half dozen of the other.

I went with a switch_to_blog and a database queue over the feed since the feeds would be cached and you;d fill up the data in the database of the main blog.

Really would be a toss up.  Again, I haven't tired it yet.