Autoblog posts in wpms(network) into main site including featured images

Question

I've a scenario like this:

• Blog writers, write their content into their blog and whichever post that they'd like to be seen in the main site should include the category 'Featured' (they're trustworthy!)
• the 'featured category' posts from each blog are gathered in a category named as the blog's name in the main site
• All the categories of the main site are shown in the main site's page and the posts are linked to their own blog" ( except for the posts of the main blog itself )
• A slider shows the latest posts of the entire network on top of the main blog

My first question is: "What's your suggestion for this scenario?"

I've used Auto-blogging for this scenario and have tested many plugins. The problem of auto-blogging plugins with this scenario is the Slider part.

Slider needs the thumbnail and in wp thumbnail can't be a url, it should be an attachment id. so auto-blogging or aggregation plugins download the first image of the post and attach it to the post so every time a post is pulled to the main site the featured image is duplicated.

so the second question: If Auto-blogging or aggregation is the solution, is there one that hasn't this problem?

I've googled and searched in stack overflow and wordpress.stackexchange but no similar questions.

I'll appreciate any suggestion for this scenario. thanks in advance

Answer 1

well, what i did finally is to use taxonomies instead of aggregation because cron based solutions are a little bit tricky with server resources and might reduce the performance:

1. install taxonomies plugin
2. add a code to it to attach the blogid of the post as custom field when saving the post
3. add a function to your theme's functions.php that pulls the image from the specified blogid (if specified) [using switch_to_blog()] and attach it to the "image_downsize" filter
4. add any other functions needed to pull the featured image from the post's original blog into your theme