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multisite – sub sites share the same contents of main site

Hi there,

I’m running a multi-site network with 10 subsites. Everyday I post some contents to the main site and I want the same contents automatically appear on the 10 subsites as well. Please note, I don’t mean “copy” to the subsites as the amount of data is fairy a lot and duplication means wasting a lot of DB space. Thus, I don’t need the “Multisite Content Copier” plugin.

Please help and provide a solution.

Thanks

Leo

Tue, 4 Feb 2014 20:48:11
  • Imperative Ideas
    • HummingBird

    Two points here.

    1. If you clone data between sub-sites and your main network site, you absolutely MUST ensure that the new single items are set to noindex/nofollow. Otherwise you risk a duplicate content penalty that will sink the entire network.

    2. The switch_to_blog() function controls this post behavior. Here’s an example.

    There are a couple of caveats here, which add considerable complexity to what you are attempting. First, the featured image will not be carried over using this function. Second, ordering your post feed properly based on 10 sites worth of data may require an array merge. There are a few ways to handle it.

    What you are asking for seems like it should be easy to do but you’ll find it’s going to give you some gray hairs before you get it working.

  • Vaughan
    • Ex Staff

    Hi @leo,

    @Imperative Ideas is correct.

    Personally if you don’t want to duplicate content, the switch_to_blog function would be what you need. But heed the warning about grey hair :wink:

    Depending on how you want that data to be used, are you just displaying it? then you might want to look at just using an RSS feed? it might be a lot simpler.

    Or use Autoblog (though that would make posts of the data it imports from the feed, so bit like content copier, though with the permalinks, the links & titles would link back to the original blog when clicked on.

    Hope this helps