Outrageous

!

Outrageous! In a good way; and unexpected, very unexpected. Jokes about thanking the Academy haven't been funny since ever, so I'll just move on celebrating with a related post.

I had two questions about using Multiply to insert content from multiple blogs in the one page, and it is indeed very easy. It's liable to be super inefficient in terms of database usage (cache! cache!), but easy to do.

It's the same as adding multiple WordPress "Loops", but you change the press_id before each one. That's it. Here's an example with the second blog in a sidebar, sans all useful functionalitybells and whistles:

<div id="main">
    <h1>Main Column</h1>
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
        <div class="post">
            <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
            <span class="time"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></span>
            <?php the_content(); ?>
        </div>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
</div>

<?php
/** 
* For this sidebar, the `press_id` is set to 1 (i.e., first alternate blog).
* After that, use `query_posts()` to get the new posts.
*/
mb_set_press(1);
query_posts('posts_per_page=10');
?>
<div id="sidebar">
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
    <div class="sidelight">
        <span class="sidetitle"><?php the_title(); ?></span>
        <?php the_content(); ?>
    </div>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
</div>

In case you missed it:

/** 
* The `press_id` is set to 1 (i.e., first alternate blog).
* After that, use `query_posts()` to get the new posts.
*/
mb_set_press(1);
query_posts('posts_per_page=10');

You can change to as many Multiply presses as you want, but because of a bugfeature you can't set the loop back to the main blog. Rest assured, it's high on my list of things to forget I promised to do in the next version. All it really means is that the alternate loops need to come later in the page code than the main one -- well, later than anything at all that relies on the main blog's database tables. I don't think it's a huge problem for most people, and can be hacked around pretty easily with output buffering.