I’ve been developing an application on Wordpress-MU and thought I’d share a cool tip.
When new web sites are generated by my client, I wanted the experience to be painless; a one-button ready-to-go web site.
It turns out there is an action hook (of course there is!) when a new blog is created. So let’s get down to the nitty gritty and see how to implement it.
I wanted to create a property that would apply to the new web site, which would allow my client to limit what data gets displayed on that site. I also wanted to generate the basic set of pages that I am using to support the sites’ URL structure. Each page has a unique template that gives it some special navigation and content mojo.
So first I set the site-global option:
add_blog_option($blog_id, 'campus_selection_criteria', "CampusStateID LIKE '%'");
Now for the pages with their templates. In order to let wp_insert_post know which blog to use, we use a handy function call:
switch_to_blog($blog_id);
We will also need to specify the theme we are using so that the starting theme will be selected and the templates will be correctly associated.
I can then create the pages as I would in Wordpress-non-MU. The final step is to call add_action() to hook this code into the blog creation event.
Here is the code in its entirety
function dscp_initialize_blog($blog_id) { add_blog_option($blog_id, 'campus_selection_criteria', "CampusStateID LIKE '%'"); switch_to_blog($blog_id); // switch theme switch_theme('thematic', 'mychildtheme'); $postdata = array('post_parent' => 0, 'post_status' => 'publish', 'post_title' => 'DESCRIPTIVE TITLE', 'post_name' => 'descriptive-title', /* the slug */ 'page_template' => 'template-whatever.php', 'post_type' => 'page'); $newid = wp_insert_post($postdata); if ($newid && !is_wp_error($newid)) { add_meta($newid); } else { // your error handling code } } add_action('wpmu_new_blog', 'dscp_initialize_blog');
6 Comments
Hi there,
This is just what I’ve been looking for! Where did you put this code exactly though? If it were placed in the functions.php file it wouldn’t be called if that theme wasn’t in use… can you just place it anywhere? Like wp-config.php or something?
Thanks,
-Joel
@Joel: I wrote a plugin that has to be activated for the functionality to work.
Cool, this will really help! I’m just a little confused about what add_blog_option($blog_id,
‘campus_selection_criteria’,
“CampusStateID LIKE ‘%’”);
accomplishes?
As I am newbie I don’t know how to write plugin for a function to work ,Can you give me some reference for that function to work ?
Wow Gregory – you have just saved me so much work! Thank you for sharing this, just what I have spent a very long time researching… works a treat!
Hey just so you know the
‘page_template’ => ‘template-whatever.php’,
is no longer used as of 10/1/2009
in stead you have to update the meta data using
here is a the wordpress page to learn how to use it
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_post_meta