Multibranded Site

Newspack’s multibranded Federated Site option allows you to host multiple brands on your site. One single site can be branded with several different names, logos and colors depending on which page/post the reader is viewing.

Default Brand

A multibranded site starts with a default brand. The default brand is your site’s default configuration — it’s what you have if the multibranded site plugin is not active. This will be the displayed brand on some occasions, like when content is not explicitly part of any other brand, the main homepage of the site, or on the search results page.

Creating Brands

To create and manage your brands, navigate to Newspack > Settings and click the Additional Brands tab. Each brand will have a set of options:

• Name
• Logo
• Colors
• Shown on front options
  • This option allows you to choose what will be displayed on the brand “homepage”. By default it displays a list of posts, but you can create a new custom page to serve as the brand’s homepage to give it a more curated feel.
• Menu assignments
  • Go to Appearance > Menus and set up your brand menus if you haven’t done so already.
• Social media link assignments
• When you create a page, you can use the Content Loop block and filter posts by brands.

You can edit the brand options later by clicking the three vertical dots to the right of the brand name.

Assigning a primary brand to a post

When you add a post to more than one brand, the system will display it under the default brand. If you want to change this behavior, you can set a primary brand. In your post editor, go to the toolbar on the right. In the Post section, scroll down to Brands. When you check more than one brand, a select box will appear, allowing you to define a primary brand for this post.

Widget Options

You can control the visibility of specific widgets depending on the brand of the content you want to display. For each widget you add to the sidebar, you can create a rule to only display a widget if the taxonomy “brand” is equal to the desired brand:

Content Loop Block Filtering

When you enable a Newspack multibranded site, you get an extra option to filter posts in the Content Loop block. Here, you can select one or more brand as a filter to select the posts you’d like to display. This is especially helpful if you choose to create custom pages to serve as your brand homepages.

Campaign Targeting

It is possible to display Campaign Prompts on certain Brands. In the Prompt editor, choose the Brand(s) where you’d like the Prompt to display:

A few notes on brand-targeted Campaigns:

• Prompts will only take into account the brand that is being displayed and not necessarily the current post’s assigned brands. For example, if you assign two brands to a post, the system will display the prompt under the default brand. The prompts you configure to display on one of the two brands will not show up on this post.
• If you don’t assign a prompt to any brand, the system will display the prompt on all brands, including the default brand.
• If you assign a prompt to one or more brands, the system will only display prompts on those brands and never on the default brand.

Author, Category, and Tag Options

By default, the system displays author and category/tag archives using the default brand to include posts from more than one brand. If you want to associate an author or category/tag with a brand, you can set a Primary brand for the author, category, or tag. This will ensure the use of that brand style on that author, category, or tag archive page.

When you edit a category or tag, you will see a “Primary brand” option:

When you are editing a user, a similar option is displayed under the “Multibranded site Options” section.

How Newspack decides which brand to display

Here’s a visual of how Newspack decides what brand to display for the reader.

• Home
  • When visiting the site’s homepage, the system displays the default brand.
• Posts and pages
  • If you don’t assign pages and posts to any brand, the system won’t display the default brand unless you assign it to one category that has a primary brand.
    • If you assign multiple categories to a post and they relate to more than one brand, it will fall to the default brand.
  • If you assign pages or posts to only one brand, the system will display this brand by default.
  • If you assign pages or posts to more than one brand, the system will display the default brand unless there’s a primary brand set, in which case that will be the chosen brand.
• Category, tag, and author archives
  • We’ll display the default brand unless you select a primary brand for them.
• Brand archive, or in other words, the brand homepage:
  • We’ll always display the current brand, whether it’s just a list of posts or a static page selected in the Brand settings.
• Other archives, like date archives and search results will always display the default brand.
• 404 and any other page not included above will display the default brand.

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Setting up a Multibranded Site

• Creating Brands
• Assigning primary brand to posts
• Widget Options
• Content Loop Block Filtering
• Campaign Targeting
• Author, Category, and Tag Options
• Logic Map for Displaying Brand
• Brand Specific RSS feeds