Thread

I’ve been working several days trying to solve this problem, and it has several important requirements that are difficult to satisfy with vanilla EE.

Requirements:

• Collection of duplicate ‘mini’ sites (15 in total): all using same weblogs/custom (each having ‘News’, ‘Blog’, ‘Video’, ‘About’, etc..)

• 1 main site: Aggregates ‘News’, ‘Video’ streams (etc) with latest content from all mini sites.

• Separate Teams per mini site: Each team has writers that can’t publish and 1 admin that approves content
  • Teams cannot access other teams’ (aka other ‘mini sites’) content before publishing for privacy sake
  • All approved content is attributed to team admin as author for sorting sake

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My first instinct was to use MSM: I would clone all my weblogs/custom fields across 15 MSM’s and this would let me setup Admins and Writers per site that can see all the content of their weblogs because other teams wouldn’t have access.

Problem with this plan: On main site, I don’t know how to have a ‘News’ stream that pulls in the latest news from all 15 ‘News’ weblogs, displays only the latest 5 or so and aggregates them in a most recent list

My second idea would be single login per team: I could remove their permission to edit other users posts which would keep them from seeing other ‘teams’/sites’ unpublished work. Each mini site would filter the weblogs by author to get the correct content and the main site wouldn’t have a filter, so News stream would automatically flow all News together.

Problem with this plan: Doesn’t satisfy requirement for multiple team members. ‘Writers’ could publish any content they wished without being approved by their Admin team leader.

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Any thoughts on how to aggregate multiple weblogs as in scenario 1?  Is that even possible?

Is their another option or plugins which address this need?

We thought NSM-Publish-Plus would help us out with a spin on idea #2.  It does add some really nice write/approve/publish workflow enhancements to what EE has to offer, but still doesn’t get us closer to having isolated teams.

If it had permissions for ‘Publishers’ to only be able to see/edit their own content or drafts from ‘Editors’ in their own Member Groups then we’d be golden, but alas that isn’t anywhere in their.

Surely someone has had to deal with teams or departments working on their own content that needs to be pulled into a central pool of like content… Can anyone give us some direction?

My first instinct was to use MSM

I, too, would think this a good fit for the MSM.

Problem with this plan: On main site, I don’t know how to have a ‘News’ stream that pulls in the latest news from all 15 ‘News’ weblogs, displays only the latest 5 or so and aggregates them in a most recent list

What about this?

{exp:channel:entries channel="news" site="foo|bar|all|other|..." limit="5" ... }

That would pull from all “news” channels from all the specified sites. (This example is lifted pretty much verbatim from the docs, by the way.)

Moving to Howto.

Wow, Ingmar, that looks like it’ll do the trick.  We haven’t used MSM before, and when I watched the EllisLab screencast it only mentioned that each site’s weblogs were completely separate, not this handy little function.  Thanks for the quick reply!

Sites can be completely separate if you want, but since they share a database it’s easy to pull content form more than one site. Of course if you wanted channel “foo” from site A and channel “bar” from site B you’d have to use separate tags, and aggregation is an issue. But if you name them the same… yeah, neat little trick 😊

Wow, this is pretty handy. I somehow was under the impression that the sites were by necessity totally separate. Thanks, dudes!

Forgive me for intruding and saying something something completely off-topic, but this NEEDS to be said.

Mason… that’s an AWESOME beard you’re sporting there!