Migration to a big portal within multisite

  • Resolved Keith

    (@keithkhl)


    1 year, 4 months ago

    Hello,

    I am setting up a news portal service from multiple subsites of news journals. Just in case, all are now combined to a multisite, but portal service is new. I am only touching designs now.

    In the end, I’d like to keep all subsites’ traffic to the portal, and wonder if this plugin can help me (most likely I need your add-ons, but not sure how to combine them for below mentioned plan.)

    1. There are N number of news subsites (aged 2~4 years), but a lot of image files are redundant. Say, only less than 20% of them are served, and other 80% are useless. I forgot to clean the disk, and now I want to do so.
    2. In the big portal, by (maybe?) bulk broadcast, I would like to collect all subsites’ published contents (2,000~4,000 each), and copy images within the posts as well
    3. In step 2, I guess only served images will be copied, because dead-linked images are not going to be broadcasted – correct me if I am wrong
    4. Once bulk copy is complete, I remove all images from subsites, and replace image links in wp_n_posts (subsites) from newly created portal site (I plan to run db replace query for this) – I hope there is no error in copying images from subsites to portal in step 2, so that I don’t lose any image at this step.
    5. After that, I believe I keep images only in the portal and redundant images will be gone. I would like to keep it that way for future posts. So, if I post an article in the portal and broadcast it to relevant subsites, I do not want to copy images. I want broadcasted post’s images point to original link in portal.
    6. During bulk broadcast in step 2, from a subsite to portal, I would like to add url prefix (sort of category name in permalink), such as https://www.exampleportal.com/subsite’s news name/post_url
    7. Redirect all subsites traffic to portal from https://www.subsite’s news name.com/news/post_id (/news/ or /post/ or … but just one word, I used simple permalink) to https://www.exampleportal.com/subsite’s news name/its’ post_id
    8. Once done, I plan to post news articles only on the portal, and broadcast to subsite.
    9. In doing so, I’d like to still keep the permalink structure in step 6 and 7, so that I can easily differenciate which post belongs to which news subsite.
    10. Would be great to keep the categories from subsite to portal

    If above is possible, I can

    1. Eliminate all redundant image files that takes up valuable storage
    2. Control news flows in one place
    3. Combine all traffics to the central portal
    4. Still keep the subsites operational from outsiders’ perspective (though all traffic will be redirected to new portal) – I have to turn off redirect from time to time for other purposes

    If you think there is a better way to achieve the same goal, plz let me know. If you think it is way beyond your plugin’s (and add-on’s) scope, plz let me know the parts that I have to find my own solution.

    I used to rely on Amazon S3 (via WP Offload Media) for media storage, but given the complexity in my version of image control, I’d like to keep images locally. Once everything is done, I may go back to CDN options, assuming that I only have images on the portal.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author edward_plainview

    (@edward_plainview)

    I see two parts to your request: images and traffic redirection.

    Images: you want to bulk copy thousands of posts over to a new site, thus ensuring that only used images are copied. That is logical, but will work only if the used images are either used as the featured image, attached to the post (not used in another post) or used in a gallery shortcode.

    If a post was uploaded, not attached to a post and used in a post, it will not be copied.

    There is an add-on that more greedily detects images in posts: All Images. That might get you all the images copied over even though they are not used in a shortcode or as the featured image.

    Then you write that you don’t want images copied to the subsites anymore. If you want visitors to the subsites to see images, the images will either have to be copied over or you have to refer to the images statically – no using them as featured images or shortcodes. There are supposed to be plugins that share images between sites on a network, but they usually cause more problems than they solve since requiring a local image ID is a technical limitation of WP.

    If you wish to save disk space (which is cheap nowadays) you can use a CDN plugin that deletes the images from disk after they are copied to the CDN. Depending on which CDN you get, you might need the CDN Workaround add-on.

    That was images. I’ll reply regarding the traffic in the next post.

    Plugin Author edward_plainview

    (@edward_plainview)

    You want to redirect all traffic from the subsites to the main site, then write new content on the main site and broadcast to the subsite.

    I don’t see the point of having a subsite then?

    The permalinks I don’t know how to solve other than custom code, since you’ll need to filter the permalink generation depending on which site the post is from.

    Broadcast is generally very good at copying posts 1:1, but not modifying them in-flight.

    Thread Starter Keith

    (@keithkhl)

    @edward_plainview Thank you for the quick and detailed answer.

    For the image part, I can understand that I still have to copy between subsites. As said, storage prices are not that expensive, so I will compromise with that part. It was not a huge issue.

    But it seems that images that are uploaded within the post (not a featured image) is not copied by broadcast? is it so? I am not sure but after the simple test, I thought it coped images within the post as well. or is it just the image’s url?

    For traffic redirection, I need to keep the subsites (real newspaper sites) running for local government’s regulatory issues. But when it comes to contents control and service to public, I would like to use the main site.

    So far, my services have been fragmented and had hard time to have public recognition under a single umbrella. If it were not the regulation, I wouldn’t have the fragmented services, but this is my country I am talking about. What the hxxx.

    In worst case, I am ok my people working in subsites, as long as all contents / traffic are gathered to mainsite. My only worry in this case is category. It would be great to assign subsite’s category to mainsite’s category.

    I remember you had an add-on that broadcast from child to parent is also possible. After consolidation, I guess i shoot out drafts from parent to child and let my team work on the draft at child page. Once they are done, they can shoot back to parent (mainsite). Not my most wanted set up, but still I can control what is published. Again, in this case, matching category from one subsite to another is a key.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Keith.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Keith.
    Plugin Author edward_plainview

    (@edward_plainview)

    There are 3 types of images copied automatically in the basic version of Broadcast:

    • Featured images
    • Attached images (listed as attached to the post in the media list)
    • Images used in gallery shortcodes

    Other images will need that All Images add-on I mentioned.

    Regarding the broadcasting and the categories: all taxonomy terms are automatically copied over during broadcasting. Either the existing terms are found and used (assuming the same term slug) or the term is created. So your categories will automatically copy over.

    On the Broadcast doc page there is a list of snippets you can peruse if you wish to do anything special during broadcast, such as changing the post title / content / author, etc, or changing / adding categories or other taxonomy terms.

    So if you broadcast from a subsite to the portal site you can automatically add a category or term or something that stores which site was broadcasted from.

    Thread Starter Keith

    (@keithkhl)

    @edward_palinview Thx for the update. Didn’t know the term slug is the key for mapping. I will align them accordingly across subsites, then should be OK. Seems like most of my wanted list items can be handled. Great!!

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Keith.
Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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