Blog Networking Plugin for WordPress

By ahmedbWordPress

The BlogNetworking plugin combines two simple but necessary components of any blog network: the ability to automatically create a blogroll in the sidebar and to show the latest headlines from across the blog network.

You can see the BlogNetworking plugin live in action at the bottom of the Soccerlens.com sidebar (under ‘Network Headlines’).

The plugin uses a central feed of network sites to pull headlines and display them on your site. The easiest way to do this is to use the blogroll opml of any one site in your network (http://yourblog.com/wp-links-opml.php) ideally the network hub (remember to add the RSS feed link for each site in the blogroll).

There’s a lot that can be done with this plugin, and I’d be interested in hearing your suggestions for improving it.

Much thanks to Damian for putting this plugin together (and Chris for the inspiration) – you can catch the installation instructions on his blog here.

Download the BlogNetworking Plugin here.

16 thoughts on “Blog Networking Plugin for WordPress”

  2. I had to change the theme because on the first it didn’t show nice. I had the Vertigo theme by Brian Gardner first but I couldn’t get rid of the lines between the post url and the blog url. Now that I changed the theme it looks quite nice.

    I do have to say that this blog is by far finished (is a blog ever finished?) and ill be changing a lot on it including the theme. This is the blog that is registered at the Dutch chamber of commerce and isn’t a priority at all. This is the site of the Promedia Blog Network and here you can see the plugin in action. I do have to say that there are now only 3 feeds showing, there will be others added in the next few day’s/week’ s. Like i said this isn’t a priority.

    If you want to see it with the Brian Gardner theme just let me know and ill change the theme for a day or so.

  4. I’ve got it working now on my front page thanks to Eureka and 1-800-HART but I cant seem to get it working on one of my pages. Thanks for the tips guys!!

    And btw. I don’t have 50 sites;)

  5. I Guess I’ve got too many sites in my BlogNetworkRoll ….

    Received error message:
    Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 3567984 bytes) in /home/hen/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 347

  6. That seemed to show Promise. I’ve updated to add the RSS for all 50 or so of my blogs in the advanced section, removed the sidebar reference and left it as it’s own page
    http://www.hart-empire-network.com/network-feed/

    Currently – it only picked up 2 headlines, 1 from each of the two blogs that were previously setup. Maybe it will all catch up or ping itself and show me soon .. I’ll keep you updated!

    Thanks Damian

  7. After much head scratching I’ve found the problem. Its the documentation or rather the way WordPress is displaying the documentation. For some reason when WordPress displays a post is changes the ‘ character to ’ . Not much of a difference to the eye, but one works to define string in PHP the other does not.

    I’ve updated the documentation to use ” instead, which isn’t changed by WordPress.

    In conclusion.
    You need to put

    in the sidebar.

  8. If it ever works .. it would be nice if the plugin allowed me to put code for separated blogroll categories, like I have in my sidebar (And You Will, Battling For Health, @ HART Market, etcetc)

  9. @chrisg & @damianm

    The plugin is activated and installed as you noticed, I am using the http://hart-empire-network.com/wp-links-opml.php in question .. which, is my blogroll .. in the OPTIONS/BlogNetworking/ menu.

    In my blogroll which is already created, I edited only two of them (PetLvr/1800HART) before I go and do all of these 50 sites, BLOGROLL/MANAGE/ADVANCED/RSS FEED .. and inserted my RSS Feed. (I tried both wordpress and feedburner feed url’s e.g. http://1800HART.com/blog/feed/ and http://feeds.feedburner.com/hbsmc/DoCL)

    In my PAGE .. http://www.hart-empire-network.com/network-feed/ I’ve got


    In my SIDEBAR .. above Meta section .. I’ve got

  10. Network Feed

    11. As you can see – neither show up anything.

    Any suggestions?

    This is the code I’ve manually placed on the other pages without the plugin:

    * Battling Cancer
    (Battling The Monster - Cancer)


    items) && 0 != count($rss->items) )
    {
    ?>
    items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 10);
    foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
    ?>
    '>
    *

    All I have to do with the above is change the URL and heading (I’m lazy and haven’t done that yet as I’m still consolidating sites into subdomains)

  13. When you say you couldn’t get it to work, what exactly happened? Did you test the opml was ok and returning XML correctly?

  14. I couldn’t get it to work either for code in the sidebar or on a separate unique page (which I would have preferred). I just used the current blog’s blogroll/opml file.

    tested in sidebar and on http://HART-Empire-Network.com/network-feed/ page

    I haven’t completed anything, but this is how I was doing it without the plugin
    on .. http://www.hart-empire-network.com/blogs/entertainment/ as an example ..which uses some simple PHP code derivative I basically found over at:
    http://wordpress.i-jeriko.de/2007/05/31/display-rss-feeds-in-your-blog/

    oh / URL’s were stripped. just copy/paste

  15. A generic PHP code block would make it possible to integrate the blogroll on every webserver with PHP. If I understand WP right source code tweaking is common knowledge

  16. Yeah but most blog networks use individual installs of WordPress, especially the ones this is aimed at which might be just a group of pals who want to link together.

  17. This is a nice solution (not tested). But to tell you the truth for a multi blog environment I would prefer a multi blog system which is capable of handling multiple domains.

    Or a PHP solution which can be inserted into every template whatever system the single sites are using.

    As always just my two cents…

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