Good plugin, but too limited for what I need

First of all, congrats to the developer for taking this on. I did a thorough search, and right now, this is the only available option I could find (some other plugins which used to do this are no longer supported).

I was looking for something that would cross post from one self-hosted blog to another. Cross Post will do this if the destination blog is attached to WordPress.com via Jet Pack, and the JSON API is enabled. There are explicit instructions on how to set this up in the Forum, and if you follow them, it’s fairly straight forward.

That said, after a thorough investigation, I decided I couldn’t use Cross Post. The basic problem is that my sites all use featured images, and all use custom fields. Cross-posting a post without that information is next to useless for me, and that’s what happens. That was the killer.

Another issue, which I could have worked around, but was annoying, is the inflexibility of automatic cross posting. I was looking to cross post posts from a city-wide database to another site that focused on a particular neighborhood. Cross Post uses only Categories to decide whether to ignore or cross post something. Given the way my taxonomy was set up, there was no convenient way to manage this. It needs to allow cross posting by tags, or by a custom taxonomy, as well as categories. Right now, it appears the category selection can only block whether a post gets cross posted. There needs to be an affirmative option, such as “only post if it’s tagged ‘crosspost'”.

If you use basic Posts without additional custom data, this is potentially a very useful plugin. If you use custom fields, taxonomies, and featured images, it’s probably too limited.

I hope the developer continues to enhance this product, because I’d love to be able to use it.