Outta Bounds

A few months ago, I started working on a WordPress MU (multi-user) install to host the few blogs at Smith College ITS. Once I got it setup, it seemed like the next logical step to open the install up to other people on campus. Hosting 10 blogs isn’t any harder than 1000 from an administrative perspective, and the campus needed a quick & easy web-publishing platform.

So, after a few meetings to decide on policy for the blogs and whatnot… we’re live this semester with 138 blogs and 131 users today.

After getting new user registration setup, one of the first things I wanted to get working was a dynamic front page for my WP MU install. And, the only way I figured any of this out was reading other people’s blogs, so here goes!

The first step was setting up a custom theme for the front page, which I based on the “Piefecta” 3-column layout from Position Is Everything  and the original Sandbox WordPress theme from plaintxt.org

I setup a Template page for the “portal,” which has a Featured Post block, Recently Updated (public) blogs block, and News & Updates block below that. (To setup a blog to use a template as the front page, make a new Page using your Template for the front page and a new page using the Default Template for your posts page, then go to Settings → Reading and use the “Front Page Displays” block to specify your front page and posts pages.)

The Featured Post and News & Updates blocks are actually a simple RSS parser that grab the appropriate feed. The parser uses Magpie RSS, which I simply added to the theme so that it could be easily included without screwing around with urls.

The code below could easily be adapted for other sites:

Featured Post Block, pointing to http://sophia.smith.edu/blog/winblog/feed/

News & Updates block, pointing to http://sophia.smith.edu/blog/feed/

** While I was working on this parser, I found a few resources online particularly useful, listed below:
PHP and RSS: Getting it Together from IBM
List/Display YouTube Videos with MagpieRSS from NetWebLogic
PHP, XML, and Character Encodings from messy-78

For the Recent Posts block, I’m using a template tag provided by the plugin Most Recent Posts – Updated, which I originally got from WPMU Dev and edited for my own purposes (released here: Most Recent Posts (Updated Again) ).

For the Sidebar, I’m using the Ada List All [widgets] plugin, which adds new/updated/active blogs widgets and a login widget that I put together using some code by Patrick Murray-John [via bavatuesdays' New digs for UMW blogs, or the anatomy of a redesign].

The FAQ & How-To pages are just regular pages using the Default Template, the News & Updates page is the posts page (specified in Settings → Reading) using the Default Template, and the Blog Directory is a custom template that calls the List-All plugin’s template tag.

Of course, there’s a lot more under the hood, but that’s probably a pretty good explanation of how I built a dynamic front page for WordPress MU.

Edit 9/26/2008: I switched from my own Most Recent Posts plugin to Aziz Poonawala’s superior
AHP Sitewide Recent Posts Plugin for WPMu.