Multiple Sites + Crossposting/Aggregation?

[BCoyle]

Hi everyone. I have some questions regarding the feasibility of a setup I would like to have. I’ve seen several helpful posts from people asking on behalf of similar ideas, but I’m a bit of a noob in terms of dev capabilities so I figured I would make my own post.

I would like to start writing again but the issue I have is that the topics I want to write about are so wildly different, and would entail different audiences. (For example, politics & genealogy. You could imagine how people who follow me for one might have no interest in the other, and may even be turned off or hesitant to subscribe due to this stark contrast).

What I am wondering is, whether or not there are any decent solutions for creating multiple blogs + a singular site/blog that could include content from the others? I know I could install multiple Ghost instances on subdomains, and I’ve heard about headless CMS and Gatsby but don’t fully understand if that’s what I need?

Example 1:
www. mainwebsite .com
Aggregates content from the following:
www. subdomain1.mainwebsite .com
www. subdomain2.mainwebsite .com
www. subdomain3.mainwebsite .com

Example 2:
www. mainwebsite .com - 1 Ghost setup, shows everything
www. website2 .com - Specific tag collection?
www. website3 .com - (Same as above)
(Alternatively, with subdomains.)

Ideally, each site would be able to have it’s own frontend, native or otherwise (Different Ghost themes for each? Something else?). I am not married to either having multiple installations or one, so long as the content is separated on the front end. (Tag collections alone don’t seem to be enough of a separation for this.) Having different backends (multiple installs) might be better for me in terms of organizational purposes, but I would then need to figure out how subscription/membership would work in this context.

One feature I like in Wordpress is the ability to make custom post types, so that these different post types would display as separate sections in the dashboard (helpful for my uses) as well as allow for different archive layouts and customization with the right plugins/tools. Although, that would still involve all of the content appearing on the same URL. I believe there are ways to map taxonomies to subdomains, but I’m pretty hellbent on wanting to use Ghost for this project so I’m hoping this is something I can do?

Ghost Newsletters accomplish something similar to what I’m envisioning, where people who subscribe to your site can subscribe to certain newsletters but not others. It would be nice to export subscriber data and see if they subscribed to blog1, blog2, blog3, or all. Ghost’s ability to segment members with tiers & labels is great, but I’d worry about directing all these different audiences to the same site.

Obviously I could manually copy and paste content from one Ghost instance to another and maintain separate subscriber lists and maybe use Zapier but there are a lot of reasons why that probably isn’t optimal haha.

So… what do y’all recommend? What level of integration is possible, not worth doing, etc., and what are folks’ thoughts on ways to do this? (And if anyone has examples of similar implementations, tutorials, etc., that would be much appreciated!) Sorry for the long post! Hope what I’m asking makes sense. Thanks!

[vikaspotluri123]

@BCoyle

Tag collections alone don’t seem to be enough of a separation for this.

It might be a bit tedious depending on the routing layout, but you should definitely be able to use tags to segregate your content. Effectively, you can use the home page as a content-neutral landing page (or provide a preview of all the different content that’s available), and the different routes as the topic-specific landing page/separation

@BCoyle

One feature I like in Wordpress is the ability to make custom post types, so that these different post types would display as separate sections in the dashboard

Ghost has the option to create custom post views (filters based on post attributes) in the admin panel. Not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for

@BCoyle

Ideally, each site would be able to have it’s own frontend, native or otherwise (Different Ghost themes for each? Something else?).

@BCoyle

as well as allow for different archive layouts and customization

It’ll take a bit of effort to set up, but you should be able to create completely different frontends for specific content. There’s lots of flexibility, one example being custom post templates.

@BCoyle

I believe there are ways to map taxonomies to subdomains, but I’m pretty hellbent on wanting to use Ghost for this project so I’m hoping this is something I can do?

IMO if you want to completely segregate the content across domains, it’ll be better to have multiple Ghost installations, since Ghost is architected to support a single frontend (and optionally backend) base URL. But as you mentioned, this also means you won’t have cross-instance data sharing (unless you macgyver your own).

But a parallel question is how important is a separate domain? Personally, if I subscribe to you because of your expertise in genealogy, and I can choose if I want to opt in to your takes on politics, that would make me feel like I have enough control over my preferences; it would be more frustrating to me if I had to subscribe across multiple places.

[BCoyle]

Hi, thanks for your reply!

@vikaspotluri123

It might be a bit tedious depending on the routing layout, but you should definitely be able to use tags to segregate your content. Effectively, you can use the home page as a content-neutral landing page (or provide a preview of all the different content that’s available), and the different routes as the topic-specific landing page/separation

Makes sense. Right now I am just using default routing and such, but I have read about creating content collections and will be testing that and thinking about whether that might be part of the solution.

@vikaspotluri123

Ghost has the option to create custom post views (filters based on post attributes) in the admin panel. Not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for

Hmm, yes, I think you’re right! I’m still getting used to categories + tags as opposed to primary / secondary tags but I think this would accomplish what I had in mind.

@vikaspotluri123

It’ll take a bit of effort to set up, but you should be able to create completely different frontends for specific content. There’s lots of flexibility, one example being custom post templates.

Ah, okay! I need to look further into this as well. Just a bit of a learning curve for me with the .yaml architecture. But I see that custom post formats are essentially the same thing as different archive layouts on WP, although it would have to be done per each individual tag, I think? Although yeah, this does seem doable.

@vikaspotluri123

IMO if you want to completely segregate the content across domains, it’ll be better to have multiple Ghost installations, since Ghost is architected to support a single frontend (and optionally backend) base URL. But as you mentioned, this also means you won’t have cross-instance data sharing (unless you macgyver your own).

Yeah, the lack of interoperability would be the biggest issue with a multi-installation setup. It does seem like it would be a pain to manage subscribers across multiple installations, and if any form of subscription payment were involved, it seems like a hassle not worth the tradeoff.

@vikaspotluri123

But a parallel question is how important is a separate domain? Personally, if I subscribe to you because of your expertise in genealogy, and I can choose if I want to opt in to your takes on politics, that would make me feel like I have enough control over my preferences; it would be more frustrating to me if I had to subscribe across multiple places.

That question is what I am still pondering. I just wanted to explore the feasibility of some of the things I mentioned, and think about what might best fit my needs here. I figured that I should be thinking about this now, and potentially avoid a much larger hassle in the future if I ended up needing to switch from one “system” to another. With emails, it seems relatively easy to allow subscribers to choose the types of content they want to receive in their inbox, so I might otherwise just be overthinking all of this in the first place.

You’re absolutely right that it would be frustrating to subscribe across multiple places, and if it would be difficult to integrate multiple installations in a way that does not make it easy to manage subscriber data, that tells me that it’s probably not worth doing. I just wasn’t sure. I certainly would not want to have to ask people to subscribe on multiple sites or have to manually worry about porting subscribers and removing unsubscribers in several places.

Ultimately, I’m just thinking about how to organize and structure content on both the frontend and backend. If all of the content is just going to be under the title of “My Blog,” regardless of topic, the lack of different branding might be yet another reason to not attempt to have any type of complicated setup.

Thanks for the input, I appreciate it!