Sub-Sub-Blogs — creating and importing content into a custom sub-type

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Description:

The university radio station I volunteer at uses WordPress 3’s Network Mode for the entirety of its web content. It uses the format:

  • Top-Level (.com/*) — Basic station
    information, links to feeds, etc. The
    main site.
  • Subdomains (*.domain.com) —
    Station departments (I.e., “music”,
    “spoken word”, etc.)
  • Program Top-Level Sub-Directory
    (.com/program/*)     — Custom post
    type (“Program”) for individual
    shows airing on the station. Locally-written proprietary code.

Most producers have existing social media property (Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/Soundcloud/Tumblr, to name but a few), and we’re wanting to encourage producers who don’t currently use social media to start using it. To this end, I need two facilities — a blog system and a RSS importer.

Questions:

  1. Blog system — Users should be able to post directly to the WP system, but be restricted to individual program categories. I can probably figure out the first part with roles, but is there any way to restrict where a particular user is able to post? I’ve also thought about doing this as another custom content type so as to keep it separate from the main station posts system, but it might be difficult to get an RSS importer plugin (See below.) to work with this.

  2. RSS importer — I don’t want to force users to use the station’s WP system if they’re already using other social media tools. Because most social media tools worth their salt produce RSS feeds, I figure the easiest way to accomplish this is via a RSS importer. I’ve used feedwordpress in the past, but I worry it’ll be both too confusing and too powerful for the users I want to access it. Think this is simple enough I could code it from scratch, or is there a particular plugin I should use?

Thank you!

1 Answer
1

At the end of the day, the developer I’m working with and I came up with two solutions:

  1. Create a new blog (via Network mode) for each individual blog and just import into that using, say, FeedWordPress.

  2. Create a new custom content type and do some mod_rewrite tweaks to put it in the path structure specified above. In the Program content type, a new field that defines the blog’s RSS feed (whether it be on-site or off-site) directs a single text link to the latest blog post.

We ended up doing the second option because it was closer to the spec and really much more elegant.

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