Sync Multiple BC sites

[painfreeit]

I have a customer who has 5 affiliated websites(Radio Station).  The websites all use the same template and use a web app for blog posting.  They have two news stations and would like to submit the blog post on one site and and have it post on both of the sites.  They are fine with having one site be a master and only post from that site.  I did a little searching but most of the posts were old and went to dead links.  I haven't found a post with this issue.

They would also like to do the same thing with just static text pages as well.  They have a broadcasting schedule and don't want to update the same thing on both pages.  They want to update the page on one site and have the exact page on the other site update as well.  In this instance it would go across to all 5 pages but I assume if you can do it for one site it will work on all the sites if you keep one site the place where everyone posts.

I realize this has two parts but I posted in web apps because the blog posts use a web app.  The second part would just be a normal page with text.  If I should move my post please let me know. 

I would be thankful for any suggestions.  Thanks!

[Liam Dilley]

Firstly,

Do they understand having two different sites with the same content is duplicate content. This will effect both sites ranking negatively in google quite significantly.

[painfreeit]

They do but don't care.  I hate they are doing it for the blogs but it's what they want. The static pages are usually for local weather announcements so I care less about that.

[Liam Dilley · Accepted solution]

No sync option or feature in BC for that anyway.

It would have to be API or manual process for blogs and manual for web apps.

If they are built with web apps just have the same app on different sites, export the web app items and import them in. Any images etc have to be saved to the other site.

[painfreeit]

That's how it is setup now and they hate it.  I will tell them that's just the way it is. Their previous websites were able to do the sync with Drupal that's why they are pushing it so hard.

Thanks for the response.

[israelisassi]

A possibility would be to put all of sites in on BC account. Each site could be in a separate folder to help keep it organized. This way they could share web apps, calendars, etc.  The URL for each site would have to be forwarded to their respective folder.

[TheBCMan]

If you don't care about google ranking it's very easy to use the BC blog RSS feeds to display the content on the other sites.

http://docs.businesscatalyst.com/Videos/Modules/using-the-rss-module

[TheBCMan]

Second post because my post is being moderated and not visible (I linked to the business catalyst official documentation!)

If you don't care about google ranking it's very easy to use the BC blog RSS feeds to display the content on the other sites.

Search the official documentation for a how to video.

[Liam Dilley]

Since they built their news/blog with a web app and that you have to always manually add every news item to the RSS to have it show it - Yet to find a client who does it or does not forget to do it so it is not something very viable until BC allows auto seeding like the blog does.

Your posts will be unmoderated, things with links and certain key words are automatically flagged by the spam filter(Mentioned to you before) No one is manually doing that and in under a day they get approved or not by mods.

[painfreeit]

Assuming I make them manually add every item to the RSS how would the site I want it to push to maintain the posts layout?  Web apps have list view and detailed layout.  Would just the text go through and nothing else I take it?  I have used RSS but have always used a reader to read the new posts, I've never used it to post content on another site.

[Liam Dilley]

He did not really think it through for you.

You would have to javascript read the xml, form the listing, code you own pagination to run on the other sites. You would not have a URL for the detail page, you would have to do a xml read and dynamic load of content into the page etc.

[TheBCMan]

Seriously Liam? I can't see how you are a moderator and heckle anyone else offering an opinion or solution.

BTW you could also use an iframe, which would be even easier.

[jnowland]

We have done similar stuff to get an iPhone app using BC data - you would need to set up a third party API/database and send all the posts to it via a front-end form.

You would then need to replicate the admin panel, pull in the data from a third party api/server and submit it to BC.

Note: as BC doesn't have any background progress they would still need to be done by visiting the page and hitting a button.

This would be a huge pain to implement VS copy and pasting content across multiple blogs (5mins per post).

At the end of the day BC is likely the wrong tool for this requirement.

[MinPark]

How about having all those websites (domain names) within a single site

and you just set different start pages for each domain then go from there

You may struggle with the 'default' template though