Syndication

Content syndication is when web-based content is republished by another website. When you syndicate content, it means that instead of linking to content on a different website, the content you want is displayed directly on your website, using your theme’s look and feel. When content is syndicated, you do not have to copy and paste it—it shows up on your website from the source automatically.

Syndicating News Content

Often, the Interactive Design<Design team gets requests for content syndication from BU Today, Bostonia, The Brink, and school and college publications. There are two major challenges to syndication that we still need to solve before making a University-wide solution for content syndication available.

Categorization and Tagging of Source Material

One major challenge is ensuring that the source content is organized and tagged in a way that matches your website’s syndication needs. Let’s say you are the College of Communication, and you want all articles about your faculty from BU Today that have to do emerging media. In order to provide you with that set of content, BU Today needs to have all of the following tags or categories on the relevant content:

  • College of Communication
  • faculty
  • emerging media (or a set of tags that emerging media could comprise, such as technology, social media, and data analytics)

This means there is quite a lot of coordination that needs to happen from a content perspective to pull the content you want into your website automatically. In some cases, the infrastructure is already available, which means there is less work from a content perspective. In other cases, implementing syndication needs to be a concerted effort between two entirely different teams and will be dependent on the availability and bandwidth of the content creators.

In the case of external news services, such as the New York Times, this infrastructure almost never exists, and it is best to link to their site directly.

Building the Syndication Infrastructure

Currently, we do not have a prebuilt infrastructure for content syndication of any kind. That’s not to say this is impossible—there are some very promising tools that can help with syndicating content from site to site available in WordPress. However, implementing this system does require significant backend development work from our team to make a reality. A few of the many factors that we need to consider when implementing syndication include implications on SEO (duplicated or copy/pasted content significantly hurts search rankings), when and where syndication should occur in the website, what level of flexibility is needed in the number of items that appear at once, and how we handle the page design when few or no items are available to show.

Lower-Cost Options

There is another option we can provide at a lower cost to give you one of the main benefits of syndication—avoiding copy/pasting a stub or excerpt into a new post and then linking to an external article. The BU External Permalinks plugin allows you to create a post that shows in your news feed, add an excerpt and featured image, and instead of adding content, link directly to the article at an outside source, such as the New York Times. This interim solution is much easier to implement, improves the user experience on your site significantly, and lowers your content entry burden. Contact your Interactive Design account executive if you are interested in using BU External Permalinks.

Syndicating Profiles

Another very common request we receive in Interactive Design is the ability to share—or syndicate—profiles between two websites, usually a “parent” website, like a school or college, and a “sibling” website, like a department within that school or college. For example, the College of Communication might have a profile directory on their main site, and they may want to display a subset of those same profiles on the Communications Research Center website without having to duplicate their content. Profile syndication has all the same challenges as news syndication, as well as some additional challenges that make it especially tricky to implement well.

Additional Challenges to Syndicating Profiles

The following challenges make profiles especially tricky to work with:

  • Profiles are managed in different ways across the University. Some profiles are hand-coded in websites, some use BU Profiles, some use profiles.bu.edu, and some use MyCV. Without a consistent profiles solution, it is very difficult to syndicate profiles.
  • A unified profiles solution is on the University road map. Our friends at Information Services & Technology (IS&T) are aware that we need consistency in our profile management, and it is on their road map. That also means that it is risky to build our own syndication. We don’t know for sure when this will be complete.

Things to Know Before Starting a Project Request for Syndication

Everyone—from the Interactive Design<Design team, to IS&T, to your fellow schools, colleges, and departments—is eager to solve the challenges with content syndication and find a solution that will work for the University. However, there is a reason why this very popular request hasn’t been cracked just yet, and it’s because it’s just plain not easy. Before submitting a project request for syndication, we want to make sure you’re prepared for what’s ahead.

  • Syndication is a multiteam effort. It requires significant coordination between multiple groups. To make your request a reality, we may need to coordinate with many people, including (but not limited to):
    • Resources in the Interactive Design<Design team
    • The BU Today, Bostonia, The Brink, or school/college magazine teams
    • IS&T teams
    • Outside vendors
  • Syndication is limited by the availability of your source content. In order to bring content onto your website, the source of your content has to “allow” us to bring in that content by making it available to us, usually through an API. If the source does not have an existing process available to bring their content onto your website, one will need to be created to move forward.
  • Syndication is limited by the organization of your source content. If the source content is tagged and categorized consistently and in the same way that you need the content organized on your website, there may be a path forward for your request. If it is not, there may be significant efforts and costs associated with retagging or reorganizing that content, assuming you have access to it and are able to change it.
  • Syndication takes significant time to organize and build. In any multiteam effort, the timeline will be dependent on each team’s resources and availability, as well as the size and scope of the project. Syndication is both a multiteam effort and is usually a large effort in terms of size and scope to complete. It usually requires significant planning as well. If you have an important business need driving a critical project timeline, it may be best to handle syndication separately from other project requests in order to keep other needs, such as a design refresh, on schedule.
  • Syndication is expensive. Relative to many project requests we get, syndication is an expensive feature request. Your Interactive Design account executive can help you navigate your budget and coordinate with our team to find out whether syndication is right for you and your website’s needs or propose alternate solutions that fit your budget where possible.