Newspack Network creates a connection between a group of sites, allowing for events that occur on a single site to be propagated across all sites in the network.
The architecture behind Network is one hub, with one or more nodes. The hub is the center of the network used to connect all the nodes. All sites send data/events to the hub and also pull data/events that occurred on other sites from the hub. The hub holds an Event Log, where the history of all events from all sites of the Network lives and is also where the centralized Woo dashboard is housed.
From both an editorial experience and a reader’s perspective, there is no difference between the hub site and node sites.
Setting up your Network
- In your selected hub site, go to Newspack Network > Site Role to set this site as the hub.
- Go to Newspack Network > Nodes and add the nodes that will be part of the network.
- Note that for each node, a secret key is generated. This key will be used to sign requests between the hub and nodes.
- In each node site, configure the hub and node settings:
- Newspack Network > Site Role and set the site as a node in the network
- Newspack Network > Node settings
- Enter the Hub URL
- Enter the Secret key generated in the hub for that specific node
Managing subscriptions and donations
Each site in the Network is an independent site and has its own independent Woo store, however every order and subscription from all sites in the Network are aggregated in the central Woo dashboard housed on the hub site. The central dashboard will display all Woo orders from every site in one single table.
From this table, you can browse all orders and subscriptions and get a direct link to manage them in the site where they originated.
Readers Propagation
When a new reader registers on any site in the network, it will be propagated to all other sites. This allows Newspack to check if a user with that email already exists on another node site, and if not, register them under the “network_reader” role.
Customers who register during the checkout process of a purchase or a donation are propagated as “readers” upon registration.
Customers who sign up via the various RAS features (registration modal, newsletter subscription, etc) are always either “subscribers” or “customers” roles.
Manually syncing user data
By default, user data and their roles are not propagated across the Network, only readers/customers/subscribers/authors. User data is synced if the user already exists in other sites, but not their roles, making it possible for a user to have a different role in different sites. Because of the this, you may occasionally need to change a user role and want to synch the change across all sites of the network as a one time action.
To manually sync the user and its role across all of the network, you can use the “Manual user sync” function.
- Go to Admin –> Users
- Edit the user you want to sync
- Make the desired changes to the user and Save your changes
- Find the “Newspack Network Tools” section in their profile page and click “Sync user across network”
- The page should reload and display a success message saying the user is scheduled to be synced
- Newspack Network will then:
- Create this user in every site, if they don’t exist
- Update all their information, including their roles, in every site
Distributed Post Metadata
Authors Propagation
When a post is distributed to another site in the Network, the author (and co-authors if CoAuthors Plus is enabled) information will be attached to the post. When the distributed post reaches the target site, Newspack checks if the author(s) exists on that site based on the authors email addresses. If they don’t exist, they are create and assigned the authorship.
If CoAuthors Plus is enabled, Newspack will do this for every author except Guest Authors. The guest authors’ information will be stored as post metadata and will be displayed in the bylines, but the authorship will not exist and the name of the guest author will not link to an author archive page.
Whenever a change is made to an author profile (bio, profile pic, etc), the change will be propagated to all sites where that author exists.
Note 1: Guest Authors are only displayed in the byline while the post is linked to the original post. If you unlink the post, guest authors will no longer be displayed in the bylines.
Note 2: To make sure authors are properly filtered in the bylines, make sure the “Override Author Byline” option is turned OFF in Distributor Settings.
Publication Date
With Newspack Network, the publication date will always be the original publication date where the post was first published.
Canonical URL
By default, the canonical URL assigned to a post points to the site where the post was originally written. However, you have the option to change that setting to make the canonical URL always point to a specific site in the network. This is useful if you want to distribute content from a central newsroom, but do not want this central site to be publicly available.
Note: This will only work if all sites in the network use the same permalink structure.
Ad Targeting
In most cases, a single Google Ad Manager account is used to manage ads for all sites in a Network. A key-value pair for ‘site’ is automatically created in GAM when the Google API is connected and is applied to page-level targeting on every site. This key-value pair allows for targeting of ads by site URL.
The key is also set up with the type PREDEFINED and reportable type as CUSTOM_DIMENSION, with the site URL automatically added as a value. This allows you to run reports in GAM by site URL.
Admin Bookmarks/Navigation
For ease of navigation across the Network, there are links to navigate to all the node sites from the hub site admin.
