[wp-hackers] Sharing and Reskinning Blog Post Content Across Multiple Blogs

[David Morris]

I am running MU 2.91 right now (soon upgrading to Multi-Network 3.0), and
I'm looking for a way to be able to share full blog post content across
multiple blogs with different themes.

If a post is used on more than one blog, each instance of the post would
need to have its own comment stream. Is there an easy way to approach this
without duplicating the post content over to each blog that wants to use it?


Our current idea is to use FeedWordPress along with full content RSS feeds
to simply duplicate the post content from each central blog to all of the
replica blogs, with different themes applied. However, this causes issues if
posts are deleted or updated on the central blog, and it also causes a lot
of content to be duplicated all over the database.


Some other ideas we are kicking around:

   - Create a plugin to automate the creation of master and replica blogs
   with proper themes/plugins applied
   - Create a plugin that makes each replica blog pull blog post content
   from another blog's wp_x_posts table
      - Either use the master blog's comments table and add an extra field
      to denote which replica blog the comment belongs to
      - Or use the replica blog comments table
   - Use a third party commenting system, like echo or pluck, and write a
   plugin to generate unique post id's per replica blog
   - Figure out a more automated way to propagate post deletions from the
   master blog to the replica blogs



Any ideas you guys might have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your
help,

Dave Morris