boldlygoing.com
BoldlyGoing.com is our corporate home page. On the portfolio page regarding our community website, we started the discussion regarding how we are using the bgEngine to serve quite a few website domains from the same single WP code install. We went on to discuss on the AreYou portfolio page to discuss how we are using a single them with innovative usage of the sidebar widget system and conditional calls to display dynamic content based upon the page/post/domain being called. We also mentioned there were still some challenges to overcome before being able to consider these techniques viable for customers of ours.
One challenge is how to effectively take advantage of being able to use sitemap.xml files with these domains. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines now enable site administrators to create and serve XML files that essentially map out all of the various “pages” of ones site. I placed pages in quotes because as you may know WordPress, and other database driven CMS’s are able to appear to the world (including search engine spiders) as individually created static looking pages. This sitemap concept allows the search engine to literally have a map to follow through your site.
Not only are bg.com and ru.bg.com (ru is our internal nickname for AreYou ) running on the same WP install and the same theme, but we are also pointing the user and data base tables for both domains towards the same records. So effectively we have one large site/data schema and are using the theme to sort out what the viewer sees. Hopefully we are able to do similar sorting for the search engines as well.
By installing the google-sitemap plugin along with the plugin to append the sitemap with page links created via the Ultimate Tag Warrior, we have an automated way to update our sitemap every time a new post or page is created on the site. Our challenge is that we would like the search engine to see the two sites individually (which they would be seen as two separate sites if we were installed on a more traditional basis).
Currently the google-sitemap plugin doesn’t have the capability to sense when a post has been created on one of the other domains–because they are both created under the same WP administrative backend! Until we are able to trouble shoot this, the only thing we can do is to create each sitemap manually (through the manual creation link within in the plugin’s admin page) and make sure that we regularly update the sitemaps.
Another challenge with our set up has been the set up and maintenance of our subscriber feeds. We believe by burning multiple feeds in our Feedburner account, and using the feedsmith plugin to redirect the stock WP feed links to our feedburner account, we are able to get around some of the limitations of serving out feeds from the two different domains. So far, the results in our feed reader seems to be showing correct!
One of the more interesting innovations we are in the process of setting up on the Boldly Going corporate home page is some interesting use of rotating image calls combined with random displays of pages. By using the Get Random Page plugin, we are able to create a number of similarly styled pages that will display the large, stylish images which you see on our home page. By combining Matt’s rotator.php code, we can effectively display random images on a single page. The result is that if we have several images from a single photographer, we can rotate those photo’s display on that photographers page. The random page plugin will then randomly display a page from the list of different photographers pages. Sort of a double whammy of cool effects for the home page. As we acquire more images and permissions to use them, our site visitors will be able to observe the effects of our usage of these plugins and codes.
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