Distributor plugin: Share content between your WordPress sites
Taylor LovettMeet the newest addition to 10up’s suite of powerful, open source tools for content creators and managers: Distributor.
Distributor is a WordPress plugin that empowers content managers to safely reuse and syndicate content across their websites, supporting sites within a WordPress multisite network and across the web using the REST API. Designed with an intuitive user experience at the forefront, Distributor integrates “push” and “pull” use cases.
The sharing interface is accessible from the admin bar when viewing a single piece of content in the editor or on the front end. Without leaving the content – and with just a couple of clicks – content managers can “push” the content to any other sites where he or she has permission to publish. Think of it as a “retweet” feature for your WordPress sites.
Editors can also “pull” content into the current site, reviewing available, compatible content from their other sites.
Shared copies of content preserve all of the properties of the original post, including post meta (custom fields) and taxonomy terms; copies also automatically inherit changes to the original post, unless unlinked. Shared copies can be unlinked from the original, to modify the content; the link can always be restored again later.
Built with SEO in mind, Distributor protects your content by taking care of canonical links and references.
Designed with the same extensible philosophy as WordPress itself, we want to empower developers to apply it to their unique use cases. Distributor’s “connections” framework – which includes WordPress REST API connections out of the box – supports custom connection types; developers can wire in custom sources like a news wire, asset management system, or an entirely different content management system.
Developed with real world, enterprise-grade use cases in mind, and already in use by select clients, we see Distributor as a foundation for sharing, reposting, syndicating, and reusing content across the web. Whether you have a network of online publications that share stories, a handful of marketing sites that repurpose documentation and product descriptions, or want to prepare content in staging and “push” to production, Distributor provides a foundation.
In short: Distributor is the all-in-one content sharing tool that anyone managing multiple WordPress sites has been waiting for.
Distributor is in a final closed beta, as we seek additional feedback ahead of anticipated support needs. We intend to release the plugin for free in the near future. In the meantime, we’d love to collect more real world feedback from content creators; if you’re interested in getting early access, just tell us a little about your use case, and we’ll send over a copy.
You can learn more about Distributor and request early access at DistributorPlugin.com.
Comments
The plugin web site seems to be down, but I’m intrigued by this.
The plugin site is up now – apologies for the mix up.
I’m very interested in the Distributor plugin, but the last two links (https://distributorplugin.com/) to signup or give use case for early access don’t seem to resolve.
I manage multi-site networks in higher education used as student blogs connected to course hub blogs. This sounds like a great replacement for our existing RSS feeds-based setup.
The plugin site is up now, after a small domain registrar issue. Apologies for the mix up – go ahead and submit a beta request!
What an amazing Plugin! WOW! this works great! I can publish on 3 sites and pul blogs back from any of them. The Post Image is transferred but does not seem to be set in the posted item! It takes sometime to set up however we have 3 different servers and this handles that no problem!
Great productivity help! Thank you!
Just wondering what the intention is with this plugin, as follows:
– Is it currently live?
– Is it supported and is the plan to continue supporting it / is the demand there to support it? (ie. will it be stable for a long period of time)
– If I have 1 master site and, for example, 10 other sites can I set it up so any of the 10 other sites can pull from the master site but not each other?
– can the push/pull be determined by category?
– Will it work with custom templates and custom fields (I am thinking of ACF)
Thanks.
“Is it currently live?” Yes.
“Is it supported and is the plan to continue supporting it / is the demand there to support it?” Many of our own clients depend on Distributor – we have long term plans to support this solution, and a robust roadmap. If anyone wants to help ensure it remains viable and help us maximize the resources we assign to it, we’d love to see organizations sign up for enterprise support packages.
“If I have 1 master site and, for example, 10 other sites can I set it up so any of the 10 other sites can pull from the master site but not each other?” Yes.
“Can the push/pull be determined by category?” Not using the out-of-the-box interface or configuration options, but a developer can extend the plugin to achieve that with modest effort.
“Will it work with custom templates and custom fields (I am thinking of ACF)” Generally, yes, but whether all custom fields and templates will work “out of the box” as expected, depends on how they’re configured and implemented. A simple custom text field with a value you want to display? No problem. A reference to a connected post ID (for example)? That would need developer customization, since the remote sites won’t know what that post ID references.
Nice post such a wonderful post keep sharing like this post.
Very good if this plugin can be used for Multisite and connects all posts without having to change the supported URL.
Just downloaded/installed on the two different installations – it does not seem to be able to connect in either direction – (seems to recognize other sites within a multisite – still have not tested this yet) – External Connection URL is what I am trying to configure – both on the Distributor site and Recipient site. Only says ‘No connection found.’
How do categories work?
For example if I push an article from site A, can I decide the categories in site B or are site A’s categories distributed along with the article?
By default, Distributor doesn’t push public facing taxonomies like categories over, as we’ve found that most sites don’t want to “impose” the origin site’s taxonomies on the destination site, potentially creating duplicates or messing up their information architecture. However, a developer can override this behavior: check out the “dt_syncable_taxonomies” filter in the code base.
Hello, we have a multi-author site.
Our main site is furzly.com and we have a staging site write.furzly.com. Our goal with this website is to have a bunch of contributors log into the write site just to create and publish posts. We are trying to have the staging site send those posts to our main site.
Will this plugin also import the user’s information?
For a variety or reasons (mostly security related, when it comes to copying users across sites), Distributor does not import user information. By default, the plugin replaces the author name and link with the origin site’s name and link – which would not be helpful in your situation. You can turn off that override using the “Override” setting in the plugin – however, that would result in the person who distributed the post appearing as the author. A developer can, however, override this behavior with limited effort. This Github thread provides some code snippets that might address your specific use case: https://github.com/10up/distributor/issues/435#issuecomment-520507788
I would like to have this plugin automatically bulk push content to subdomains in a multisite install. We do about 500 posts per day and a bulk push option would be needed.
A user interface to pre-configure bulk distribution isn’t on the immediate roadmap… however, a developer comfortable with WordPress can use the plugin’s hooks and filters (API) to write some code that enables workflow automation. If you’re looking for professional support extending Distributor with customer workflows, get in touch on our contact page!
Hello,
Seems to be a great plugin and exactly what a customer needs…
Is it possible to pull post by cron task ?
Sebastien – there are no WP CLI commands for Distributor. What’s the scenario you have where pulling posts by a cron task would be an optimal solution?