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<\/a>I first talked about the Content Hub in my first article for WPMU DEV,\u00a0How to Publish to Multiple WordPress Sites from a Single Install.<\/a><\/p>\n In that incarnation, the Hub was a single WordPress site that syndicated or broadcast its content to other WordPress sites, including WordPress.com sites as well as self-hosted sites, using the XML-RPC API<\/a>. At the time, there was some discussion about multisite and with the recent update to the ThreeWP Broadcast plugin, it seemed time to visit the idea of a Content Hub in a WordPress network context.<\/p>\n The idea of a Content Hub is that content creation takes place in a single location and is then pushed out to a site or sites for consumption by users, a so called “hub and spokes” model.<\/p>\n Whilst based on WordPress, the original article made clear that, in fact,\u00a0any of the components could actually be based on any technology, so long as they could exchange data in a format that the WordPress XML-RPC API could understand.<\/p>\n Obviously, in this article we are very much grounding the solution on WordPress but the idea of a “hub” pushing out content to a number of “spokes” remains at its core. It’s perhaps also a timely reminder that the XML-RPC API has a limited lifespan with the JSON-based WP API<\/a>, at the time of writing, now at version 1.1 and scheduled to be part of the WordPress 4.1 core.<\/p>\n A single\u00a0single site in the network acts as the hub. It is a private site that has all the necessary plugins and customizations necessary for managing content and all content is created and managed in the hub.<\/p>\n Many of the considerations around creating the Hub are the same regardless of whether you are using multisite or not. Setting up your categories, restricting access to the Hub site and optional plugins are all just as relevant to the multisite approach and so it would be beneficial to read the original article, if you haven’t already done so.<\/p>\n The major difference with the multisite approach is that being contained within a network, it doesn’t rely on an API to do the content pushing and so not only is it more reliable, it is also considerably more powerful: content types, attachments, custom fields, automatic updates are all possible.<\/p>\n The networked content hub is only possible because of the ThreeWP Broadcast plugin<\/a>.<\/p>\n It provides all the broadcasting functionality and actually uses an approach that is very similar to Push Syndication<\/a>: create the content in the Hub, select the sites where the content needs to be published and click publish.<\/p>\n Unlike the API approach, all versions of the content have the same post date which means that it can handle scheduled posts. If a post is linked to its parent then all updates are immediately reflected across the network.<\/p>\n The core plugin is free and provides enough functionality to get your hub well and truly up and running but once it is established you may well be tempted to get the Premium Pack<\/a>, even at $100, which adds even more features.<\/p>\n NOTE:<\/strong> The most recent version of the ThreeWP Broadcast plugin requires PHP 5.4, so check which\u00a0version of PHP your hosting environment\u00a0is running. If you only have PHP 5.3 then you’ll need to use an earlier version of the plugin.<\/p>\n In the Content Hub site, activate the core plugin and, if you want to group sites in your network together, the Blog Groups<\/em> plugin.<\/p>\n This will add a new menu option to your Hub’s Admin menu called Broadcast<\/em> which provides access to the plugin’s settings screen.<\/p>\n The main settings screen allows you to configure which roles can perform which tasks.<\/p>\n You’ll probably need to tweak these to get them exactly right for your situation and will obviously depend on your workflow. It may be that you are happy for your authors to have access to all Broadcast’s functionality or it may be that you want to completely control the publishing of content and so will completely restrict anyone but editors from seeing the metabox.<\/p>\n The settings page also lets you determine what action to take when an attachment with the same name is to be updated.<\/p>\n The other useful settings page is the Custom Post Type which allows you to select which custom post types are available for broadcasting.\u00a0Custom Post Type support is a powerful feature of this plugin.<\/p>\n Broadcast only needs to be configured in the Hub; there’s no need for any configuration in the spoke sites.<\/p>\n Much like Push Syndication’s Site Groups, Broadcast allows sites (blogs) to be grouped into Blog Groups. This is a simple mechanism: create a group and then select the member blogs.<\/p>\n If you then want to publish a post to multiple blogs – having weighed up possible severe penalties for duplicate content – you can do this quickly and easily by selecting the group.<\/p>\n Publishing, or broadcasting, to one or more spokes is \u00a0easy.<\/p>\n The plugin adds a new metabox to the post edit screen that allows for the selection of target sites (or blog group) along with configuring whether custom fields and taxonomies are also pushed to the spoke and whether the spoke’s post should be considered a child post.<\/p>\n One of the plugin’s great features is that a child post will automatically get updated if the parent post is updated, including changes to featured images, publish dates and even the post status.<\/p>\n Child posts cannot be broadcast themselves but in the Hub\u00a0situation you don’t need that, so this will nearly always be checked.<\/p>\n Here’s a sample post from the Hub and from the Spoke.<\/p>\n Everything gets copied across – featured images, attachments, shortcodes, excerpts, custom fields, tags and categories and authors.<\/p>\nThe\u00a0Content Hub : A Quick Recap<\/h2>\n
ThreeWP Broadcast : The Engine That Drives This Hub<\/h2>\n
Configuring The Plugin<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/a>Creating Blog Groups<\/h2>\n
<\/a>How Broadcasting Works<\/h2>\n
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