Maui SEO and Internet Marketing: CompMaui

WordPressMU is an incredibly powerful multi-blog tool.  It is what WordPress.com uses.  It does seem to lack a few core features that I assumed it would have out of the box.

So today I inevitably ran into a few problems…

The Primary Goal:

1) Display the newest content from any users blog within the WordPress MU install on the homepage of the WordPress MU blog in chronological order.  There can be no duplicate content (eg, content available on a users blog cannot be permalinked on the main/admin MU blog.)

The Secondary Goals:

1) Include content from a few other WordPress blogs hosted on other domains on the homepage of the WordPressMU blog.
2) Display content from non-WordPress sources within the same aggregated homepage content of the WordPress MU install (For example from vBulletin).
3) A “Read More…” feature must be integrated with WordPress MU’s built in “Continue Reading…” feature.
4) All links must take people to the original post with unaltered URLs.

How it was done:

First I had to aggregate all the feeds into one “master feed.”  This was easy using Yahoo! Pipes

Side Note:  If you don’t know anything about REGEX, you need to take a look at what it is capable of. Here are 2 Priceless REGEX Resources:
RegEx Generation Tool: A tool to generate Regular Expressions for most major coding/scripting languages.
Online RegExr: A Regular Expression Testing Tool

Next I had to find a script that could reliably post RSS feeds in a way that could mimic WordPress posts.  Solved by using RSS2HTML.

A bunch of template and code edits later, it all seems to work!

Not much of a step-by-step guide, but I’m not really done yet… If you are trying to accomplish this same task the links above are incredibly useful.  Will keep you posted!