As a regular WPMU Forum visitor, reader, and contributor ( when I can add value ), I see this question asked often. I have found many threads that offer some great hints and advice, and basically tell you exactly what to do, but all the information wasn’t in one place. So, here it is.
How to Display your WPMU User Blog’s Posts on your Main Page:
1. Download, Read the Directions, and Install the WPMU Sitewide Feed Plugin – ITDamager.
2. Go to Blue-Anvil.com and read this post that details how to fetch RSS feeds with WordPress.
3. Make the necessary changes to the RSS feed path to point to your Sitewide feed ( http://yoursite.com/wpmu-feed/ )
4. Take what you’ve learned and edit the page template in your WPMU installation where you want your Sitewide RSS feed to display.
To help me learn, I try never to copy and paste. Rather, I type out the code by hand and that helps me get familiar with the code. Unfortunately, it also makes me more susceptible to typing errors;)
Here’s an image of the code that worked for me:
Of course, after you get the latest blog posts to display, you’ll want to wrap some style elements around it and maybe make some other changes, but that’s the basic functionality.
I hope this was helpful. I’m sure more experienced WPMU’ers could add more to this, or even provide another method, but this is what worked for me.
Yep, it’s a handy tip. Just to add to that, the sitewide feed plugin also has a sitewide comments feed. Do the same thing and PRESTO.
Great way to show comments to everyone and encourage more.
Edit: this is also what people mean when they say “parse the feed”.
Hi,
Thanks for the great tutorial. I’m having trouble repeating this though. I’m rather new to php and I keep getting the error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in [...]/wp-content/themes/default/index.php on line 32
I’ve typed and retyped the code above and even tried pasting the code from blue-anvil directly into the index.php of two separate templates (including the default one). Is there something I’m doing wrong?
aaron,
What is the line on code on line 32? Is it missing a semi-colon maybe?
I’m not a PHP coder (I’m an ASP one) but if the intent of line 18 is to revert back “&” to it’s original status, I think the corret sequence to replace would be:
“&”,”&”
I have to put spaces…. remove them:
“& a m p ; a m p ;”,”& a m p ;”
Is there any example of a site on the WEB using this possibility ?
I ´d like to bring latest entries to the main blog (Preview of posts with text&pictures ?) and I now search for useful ideas/plugins.
Kind regards,
Andreas
Thanks for this tutorial, I haven’t tried building it into the code of my template yet but what I did that got me up and running really quick was I just installed the sitewide feed plugin then put the feed address into the RSS Widget that come with wordpress. Then I was able to custimze different options between the two plug-ins. I did all this with no coding required which might help people more in the beginner stages.
If you are looking for just the recent posts from your blog network, and want to make that happen on your homepage, I recommend using the AHP Sitewide Recent Posts for WPMU.
It took me 2 seconds to install and works great out of the box and even supports gravatars. It is feature rich for those that want to tweak the defaults, but I’m using it straight and really love how it looks on my home page. Find the link below.
http://wpmudev.org/project/AHP-Sitewide-Recent-Posts-for-WPMU