Some advice on setup for events website please

  • I’m a building a new website for an event the occurs in several different cities annually. Eg London 2012, New York 2012, London 2013, New York 2013 and so on.

    The problem

    Currently, each city has its own WP installation which is updated annually when a new event for that city has taken place. All websites have the same customised theme and plugins and it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain each site with the same functionality and template files, ie if I update one, all the others need to be updated also. This, as you can imagine is a nightmare, especially now each event is growing each year it becoming increasing tedious to manage. Each event has a list of sponsors and exhibitors and these are grouped with cateories (“exhibitors 2012” etc). Another problem is if an exhibitor is participating in London and New York events, the post has to be created in each installation rather than just once.

    The solution?

    I know my way around WP but I’m looking for the best way to migrate all sites into one WP installation so that they all share the same theme, plugins and posts. But each event has a different logo, sidebar, menu items.

    I’ve looked at Multisite but I’m not sure this is suitable for this kind of site?

    1. I thought I could possibly create a custom post type for exhibitors, speakers, sponsors etc and then use categories to assign them to each event (london 2012, new york 2012). Is there a way of having sitewide categories in a single WP installation so that custom post types can be assigned to them?

    2. I’m also thinking about having conditional queries based on URL to display the correct logos, menus for each event. Eg any page/post with eventname.com/london will show logos, menus, sidebar for London event. Is this the best way to do this?

    3. Then I need to export all posts from the existing installations and convert them into their respective custom post types from their assigned categories.

    Hope that makes sense!

    Any help would be very welcome

    Thanks

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  • Why don’t you create a multisite installation for the event and each city would be its own installation? You could use an event plugin similar to:
    https://wp-events-plugin.com/documentation/multisite/.

    Also, check out https://themeloom.com/ which offers an event custom post type of most of their themes.

    Thread Starter Stefan

    (@stefan83)

    Hi mwf113. Thanks for your reply. So with a multisite installation, is it possible to share posts, plugins and one theme between sub sites?

    If for example, I want to create a new exhibitor under London 2012, how would I add them to New York 2013 exhibitor list as well?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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