These days, most large organizations and businesses — and even many small businesses — have more than one website under their umbrella. Publishers and media businesses often own multiple networks or magazines; in higher education, every department often has their own site (even if it’s on the same domain); B2B and B2C marketers often attack multiple channels. And yet, when it comes to sharing content — events, news, product pages, biographies (you name it) — WordPress, like most Content Management Systems, don’t do much to address that problem.
Having solved variations of this same problem over and over again for clients like a major public university, a radio network with 60+ stations, and one of largest Bay Area unicorns (among others), 10up finally put together all of its lessons learned to build a expertly crafted solution: Distributor. Distributor is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to syndicate and reuse content across multiple websites — whether in a single multisite or across the web using the REST API.
This session will:
- Discuss examples of the problem that Distributor set out to solve
- Talk about the SEO implications of reused content, and how to ensure it helps, rather than penalizes, websites that share content
- Provide a thorough walk through of Distributor, from set up (including external REST API connections), to pushing and pulling content between sites
- Walk through the way the popular 9to5 network (9to5mac.com, 9to5google.com, Electrek.co, and others) adopted and extended Distributor for their real world workflow
- Provide developers some tips for customizing and extending distributor, using build in functions and hooks
- Tease the potential for Distributor for other use cases, like staging content for campaigns, or extending its Connections to other CMS platforms or content sources
There’s something for everyone in this talk: UX design / problem solving, REST API use case, content strategy, SEO best practice (for content reuse), tools for managing websites, and even developer tips.
Skill Level: Intermediate