Thought this was most appropriate in the general or how-to section since this is dealing with a usability feature and may not necessarily need an add-on..
I have a few planned websites I’m considering developing, some for more niche topics such as urban fashion, celebrity gossip (who doesn’t own one of these things already though), and for cards/comics/toys, and some, for more broad and general topics like news, sports, fashion (in general), etc.
What I want to do is cross-publish many of these posts, but also take into account the best SEO practices as I can. I have devised a large set of custom fields that my editors are to use that have particular fields apply and would appear on the niche blogs, as well as fields for the same entry that would apply to the more general blogs.
For example, if I have a post about celebrity gossip, I might be writing a short excerpt with a more comical and sarcastic approach, while on the more general news site, this might appear as a more formal post to cater to the target audience of the blog.
Here’s where my problem lies: In filtering how and when these might get published to which sites. I am aware I can already cross-post entries from one place to another, but I don’t want to post all items from the urban fashion site onto the general news site. So I need a way to specify which items should be posted, and to which respective site as well.
~
The Current Solution: To use categories that represent each weblog and to check them off when they apply, than run a conditional to display it or not in the weblog:entries loop. Or, use a check on a conditional to see if a certain field is empty or not.. Or use a module like Solspace’s Tag to check the existence of a tag. I know these existing methods may serve my purpose, but they are already implemented on my site towards its original intended purposes. I’d prefer to keep them that way for a number of reasons, both for future-proofing (template/module overhauls, etc.) and dummy-proofing (some of my editors are TOTALLY not web-savvy), for example.
The Ideal Solution: Simply a more elegant solution. Does something already exist for this purpose?
~
I envision a website with shared content among all platforms to create a nice, efficient community.
One more thing: What are your views on how to best approach content that is intended to be shared among sites? Have one central site to post all content, and on the niche sites, pull these entries from that site with a certain check applied, or to post on the niche site and get the main sites to pull data from those sources? What would this do in regards to statistics? To be more specific, how does this affect statistics? If I had content appearing on a niche subject site, but also appears on the general news site, do I only get that entry as counting once towards my name across all sites, or does it appear independently as 1 post on each of the sites? If not, is there some method to make it count on both sites as if they were individual posts to each one?