WP_BlogNetworking
Download
WP_BlogNetworking
WP_BlogNetworking is a free plug-in for WordPress to allow networks of blogs to share headlines through a central feed of associate sites. To avoid performance problems the feed will be cached locally.
Installation
- Download the required plug-in.
- Unzip file if required.
- Copy to your ‘wp-content/plugins‘ directory.
- Log in with an administration account.
- Select the ‘Plugins‘ tab.
- Scroll down to ‘WP_BlogNetworking’ and click ‘activate‘.
Options
Log into WordPress with an Administrator login and select “Manage->BlogNetworking” on the dashboard menu.
- Network URL
- Purpose: The address of the central feed of associate sites.
- Number of posts to display
- Purpose: The maximum number of posts to display per site.
- Time between Updates
- Purpose: The minimum time to wait between automatically getting the network.
- Last Updated
- Purpose: Displays the time the Network was last retrieved.
- Get Network
- Purpose: Get the network Now.
Usage
To insert the Widget.
- Log into WordPress with an Administrator login.
- Select “Presentation->Theme Editor” on the dashboard menu.
- Select the sidebar file from the theme, usually ‘Sidebar’.
- Inside the <ul> and </ul> tags choose the position you wish to display the feed and insert the following.
<?PHP do_action("BlogNetworks") ; ?>
- Click ‘Update File‘
The plug-in is now active. When the feed is pulled down the page will take longer to load, for this reason the feed is cached.
Setting up the central feed
The easiest way to create and manage your central feed of networks is to use your WordPress Blogroll. Your Blogroll is available as an OPML feed on your WordPress blog at http://{your site}/wp-links-opml.PHP.
To add an affiliate blog to you network, enter the site as you would any other link. The important part is that you must fill in the RSS Address in the advanced section of the links properties. Without the RSS Address the link will not appear as part of your network.
Version History
- 0.5.0
- Initial release
- 1.0.0
- Added, number of posts,time between options. Changed look to a more WordPress 2.5 feel, Used library functions.
- 1.1.0
- Fixed OPML feed bug by replacing standard XML library routines with custom regex.
Bugs & Suggestions
If you have questions, have found any bugs, or you would like to see features added to WP_BlogNetworking please feel free to use the form at the bottom of the page to contact us.
Other Plug-ins
If you liked this plug-in visits our download area where you will find many more.
Development
If you have need for a custom plug-in, feel free to contact us on our contact page to discuss a specially commissioned plug-in.
Donation
If you liked this plug-in and would like to support its development please make a donation. Any amount you wish.
December 9th, 2007 at 12:17 am
Question(s):
Has the feed entered in the box marked “XML URL” to be some existing? If yes, which?
If no, is it known if the plugin works in case the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin is used?
Thanks
December 9th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Yes the feed has to already exist.
It has to be in OPML format, the same way WordPress feeds your blogroll.
I don’t know is the Feeburner feedsmith works with OPML feeds.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:56 am
I can’t get the plugin to work. I’ve tried just about everything I can think of, but nothing shows up. I don’t know much about this stuff, but I’m wondering if it could be a permissions problem, since I’m always running into permissions problems.
Do you know of any reason why just nothing would work? Any help? Thanks.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
If you’ve managed to install and add the code to the theme it shouldn’t be a permissions problem.
What is the feed that you are pointing it at?
They only think i can thing of is that there is a problems with the feed.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I’m using this feed:
http://knoxvilletalks.com/wp-links-opml.php
I just put two test links in to get it to work before spending time populating it. If it did work, would it take 3 hours for the feeds to start showing up? Is the 3 hour bit adjustable?
Thanks.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Oh! I got it.
1 - you can’t use it in a sidebar widget, and
2 - if you copy and paste, you’ll get the quotation marks wrong. I always forget that.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
If you added the links after you first ran the plugin it will take 3 hours for the links to show up.
The time limit is not yet adjustable, on an options form.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:08 am
Hiya,
Im working on an information network site and would love to use this plugin. The issue i have is the sidebar vs widget thing. Although I am the root admin on all sites there will be individual persons for each site. The main site is here http://information-free.com , and there will be topic related sites set as subdomains. These will be in multiple languages and each lead person for topic or country will need independent control of plugins/themes/widgets. This is so each has option for independent advertisement and layout. Many will be using shared network adsense account I can add code to for sidebar but several will use many themes via theme switcher or personal selection.
Have you found a way to do it within a widget yet? if not i think I can code it or one of our members could, but being that I am working non-stop to merge WP WPMU and our WPCMS systems I’d be super happy if you knew a quick fix.
Right now we have about 10 sites started for testing and have been successful in both adding via subdomains/subfolders and even other websites fed in and back out. Our goal is to have all ready to go and provide simple use for the non tech savy while keeping it as advanced in function as possible. And our full rollout is targeted by the end of January.
Thanks in advance,
Peace.
Mich D .
Mich in the web - http://mich.in
January 14th, 2008 at 12:43 am
@Mich: I’ll put the widgetised version of this on my todo list. The person who originally commissioned this didn’t see the point for having a widgets so it was left out.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:08 am
The plugin works fine, but ‘’ is incorrect, it should be ‘’.
The issue I’m having is changing the look of the feed after I put the PHP into daiku’s tex box widget. A widget would be great.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
@Turnip: I was referring to another comment. AS I say, a widget version is on the to-do list. There might be an alternative solution available sooner as a new widget for the DCoda _widgets that is under development. Watch this space.
January 16th, 2008 at 2:58 am
Thanks, I got it working in daiku’s text widget finally, with proper CSS formatting. I simply surrounded everything with ul li -/li /ul
January 16th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Glad to know it
January 19th, 2008 at 10:34 am
New issue today. I installed the latest and greatest version of "Bad Behavior Plugin". It seems to be replacing the line in the options page of blog networking where you enter your opml feed with random text. Immediately after saving your /wp-links-opml.PHP it rewrites it to a single random letter.
January 21st, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I’ve just installed the plugin myself but cannot get it to recreate the fault. Looking through the code there should be no clash between the options of the two plugins. Is there any more clues you can give to me to trace your problem.
January 30th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Nice plugin, good work. However, you should know that it doesn’t work with blogs using the Feedburner plugin AND using the DNS services. It does, however, appear to work if you put in the "real" Feedburner feed URL:s.
January 30th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
@TDH: Thanks for the input, by the Feedburner Plugin do you meant Feedsmith burner?
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:50 am
IS THERE A WAY TO POST THE FEED LIST AS POST (yes, maybe with exec-php plugin)
AND MAKE THEM STATIC????
converting feed link list result in real html links or something like that??
If I make a weekly digest from outside website in my normal post, it will show the lastest feeds only…
I need to make static or convert the feed read to make like an a weekly link archive from the feed.
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:47 pm
@jose : There is no way to make blognetworking to create static posts. It was designed to give a dynamic list. I’m not sure of any similar plugins that might do this. You may require a custom plugin.
February 6th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I have tried for two weeks to get this plugin to work. I placed the code in my footer and the headline works but it will not pull the feeds. Here is the url to my opml http://afcdn.com/wp/wp-links-opml.php It is there, I put that address in my browser and it displays the file but I cannot get BlogNetwork to display a list of the feeds. Is there an example somewhere that I can look at the files and see what I am doing wrong?
February 6th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Ok, I figured it out. The quotation marks were wrong. I saw that above and when I manually entered the quotations in the line, it started working. Thanks,
March 16th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Hi
I would like my moblog feed to appear i my sidebar. But that won’t work as it’s not opml? I’m not so good at these things…
This is the feed I want: http://rss.mobilblogg.nu/o.o.i.s?template=rss_feed.t&user=kiona If it’s possible, can you explain how I should do it? Thanks /Kiona
March 17th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
The only think you could do with this plugin is display the latest Item on your feed in you sidebar.
To do this play your feed in your blogrol and point the plugin at that.
At this time this plugin will no display an entire rss feed.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:15 am
Hi, nice plugin. I am just working on a blog network and I look for a plugin like this. I would like to suggest some new features. Many blog networks has channels, eg. News, Politics, Beauty, Travel etc. What about to allow this plugin to show each specific channel in one feed. For example visit site http://www.bangingbags.com/ and scroll down and you can see what I mean. There is a list of the sites in the network with the feeds. Would it be to create difficult based on that or similar? Just idea.
Roman
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:45 am
@Roman -
I’m not entirely sure what you mean, I think Blognetowrking can be configure to something near to what your are wanting.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Nice to know. And can I modify the output to get with time/date of the posts, authors name of the posts?
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Not at present. With the limited space in the side bar it is just limited to the site and the post title.
This is a good idea to have as an option and will be included the the next version.
May 2nd, 2008 at 6:36 pm
well, I think what I would welcome in the plugin. At this moment users can added just one blognetwork feed of all sites. What about this:
example
for feed included technology related sites
for feed included politics related sites
etc.
I look for this that I can added specific feeds but pretty categorized on the site, because I can have central feeds of the specific channels but on the sites at this moment I can show one central feed.
May 2nd, 2008 at 6:37 pm
EDIT: there are missing codes in previous comment lines:
do_action("BlogNetworks")
do_action("BlogNetworks_2")