Behind The Blog

As noted over on our Voxeo Talks blog, I’ve now set up an email subscription option to our “All Voxeo Blogs” feed through Feedburner. For a reason I’ll discuss below, I’ve only enabled it for our all blogs feed.

However, given that this “Behind the Blog” blog is different from all of our other blogs, and also, quite frankly, because a reader requested it, I’ve also enabled the email subscription option for this particular blog. You can subscribe to just this blog via email by either entering your email address in the box in the far right sidebar - or by clicking this link. Follow the link in the confirmation email and, ta da, you’re done.

So why haven’t I done this for all of our individual blogs?

Simple. I can’t easily automate it and have it appear in the same place as the other subscription options.

Let me explain a bit more. If you go to our main portal page of blogs.voxeo.com you will see in the first sidebar under the heading “Subscribe” a link that says “Subscribe via email“. Click on that and a confirmation email later you are subscribed to the “all blogs” feed. Nice and easy.

We use Feedburner for all of our feeds mostly to get the stats and also because it provides nice options like this email subscription option.

Here’s the thing. That “portal” page uses its own unique WPMU “theme” (very creatively called “voxeo-home”) to deal with how we present entries across all blogs and other ways in which we want to make the portal page different from our regular blog pages. Because it is using its own unique theme, it’s trivial for me to add the “Subscribe via email” link. I just go into “sidebar1.php“, find the right place and add the link. Piece of cake.

However, all the actual blogs on the site use the same WPMU theme (”default”) and so they have the same sidebars by default. The problem, though, is this:

Each blog has a unique Feedburner email subscription URL.

So I can’t just add some magic to template sidebar and have this automagically work. As I’ve thought about this, I see a couple of choices:

1. Add only the All Blogs email subscription option - This is what I have done now. I’ve gone into the sidebar1.php file for the template and added the link to subscribe to the all blogs feed via email. This is simple and consistent with the other formatting. The problem of course is that it doesn’t let readers subscribe to only the blog they care about. Readers of this blog about WPMU may not care about all the other stuff we’re doing at Voxeo. Readers to “Speaking of Standards” may only be interested in our positions on standards. I’d like to offer the option. This choice doesn’t provide that option.
2. Manually add widgets to the blog sidebars - That’s what I’ve done here on this blog where I’ve added the widget over in sidebar 2 using the standard way to do so in the WP “Presentation->Widgets” menu. The good news is that I can offer the option, but the bad news is that it is off in a different area from the “Subscribe” options over in sidebar 1. (And for whatever reason, I can’t get the darn widget to say “Subscribe via email” on top, but that’s a different issue that I’m sure I’ll eventually sort out.)
3. Write some WP code to modify the template - I suspect the real answer is to write a WP function that grabs a URL from the database and inserts it in the relevant spot. In that way I’d enter the URL for the Feedburner email subscription for each individual blog into the database and then modify sidebar1.php in the theme to call the new WP function, which would pull the blog-specific URL from the database and insert it. Sounds cool… but I also don’t see me having the cycles to do that anytime soon.
4. Search for a plugin that does #3 - I suppose the other thing I can do is to search for a plugin that does what I described in #3. This involves searching through the various directories of plugins, trying out the code to see if it works with WPMU, etc. Maybe there’s one out there. (Heard of one?)

That’s why I haven’t yet rolled out email subscriptions for each individual blog. Have any of you out there solved this issue? What have you done? Is there a plugin you use for WPMU?

Technorati Tags: feeds, subscription, feedburner, wpmu, wordpress mu, wordpress, plugins

Tags: Feeds, Subscriptions

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