WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Gathering and Displaying Network-wide Content

Depending on your needs, you may want to gather content from sites across your network to display on the front page of the main site (such as with the FoodPress example we provide at the beginning of this chapter). Although some plugins will do this for you, you can accomplish this by placing a few lines of code in your theme template file.

The main page of your network is controlled by the theme that is active in your regular Dashboard under ApperanceThemes. You can customize this theme with some code samples in the next section to suit your particular needs.

Adding Posts from Network Sites

One of the best ways to pull visitors into your site is to display a short list of headlines from posts made by other sites within your network. With a single WordPress site, this simply is handled by the Recent Posts widget. When running a network, however, there's no built-in way to pull a list of posts from across all the sites in your network. However, the Recent Global Posts widget plugin available from the folks at WPMU Premium Dev can do this for you quickly and efficiently, and includes a handy widget to make it easy for you to add recent posts from across your network of sites to your main Web site.

As we mention in an early part of this chapter, plugins from WPMU Dev Premium are not free, and you cannot access them from the official WordPress ...