What are the "custom fields" for?

Hmmmm… thanks for the reading tip. I’m afraid it didn’t help me much though, as I didn’t design or add the custom fields I mentioned.

If you know, could you please tell me for example, what the “permalinks” field is for and how to use it?

I hoped I would be able to give the post any permalink I wanted, but adding anything in the “value” line doesn’t seem to change anything?

Thanks

Thanks Mika.

My background is more graphic design, and my knowledge of “coding” & php is extremely limited. Most of the wp codex might as well be written in Chinese for someone like me.

My main aim with the multisite is to create a small “community” where others can create and manage their own blogs. I want to have a “magazine-style” page on the root/home site, where I can pick & choose articles to feature from the various sub-sites.

The stumbling block for me seems to be the featured images.

I’ve used Artisteer (a wysiwyg wp layout tool) with an add-on called Templateer, which gives me the perfect magazine options. For example, I can create a page which features 4 different categories. I can also adjust the featured article length, and more importantly the featured image sizes.

However, this template uses “tim thumb” which I understand has issues with the multisite format.

I’ve been trying a combination of the mu broadcast, sitewide tags and featured posts plugins. I can now add featured posts to the main site blog OK, but if I try to use my magazine style template, the images don’t show up (tim thumb?).

If I stick to the default templates then I don’t have enough control over the featured article placement and appearance, especially image sizing.

To get around this, I tried “broadcasting” some posts to the main blog, then re-publishing them with a new category. These do show-up in the magazine template with the images, but as you might expect, clicking to read more takes you to my edited version on the home site and not the original article on the sub-site…

I had therefore been looking for a way to edit the permalinks of my re-published articles on a post by post basis to point to the original source. But this seems impossible? Every permalink has the prefix “/blog/” or another prefix of my choosing. I’m now wondering if I should create my main site as a “sub-site” which will give more options regarding permalinks?

Don’t really know where to go next with this. The featured posts plugin is almost workable, but I need more control to re-size images to a standard sizes, as the articles will have been created by other authors…….

Sorry for the length and dullness of this post!

Cheers

Thanks again Mika for your help and encouragement.

I’ll keep at it 🙂

Cheers