I am working with a non-profit client that runs several charities under one umbrella. A good metaphor would be to think of the United Way (but it’s not the United Way).
Can a WordPress multi-site installation do the following:
Share content between sites. E.g., if site A has a section called “Advocacy”, can that same content also be shown in site B? This would need to include text, photos, etc.
How centralized can administration be made? For example, can draft posts from all websites be approved in one location?
I’m sure there are other things I need to ask, but I’m still in the investigation phase.
I believe that ThreeWP Broadcast is the plugin you should use. I’ve been using this plugin in WPMS to share (and link) content between blogs, and it works well.
Basically, this plugin allows you to:
Finally, the codebase of this plugin is good, so in case you want to change something, you can go through the code, change it like you want (this is what I’m doing).
Take a look at http://premium.wpmudev.org/. There are many plugins and resources for what you are looking to do. There is also a service called ManageWP.com that works well with a multi-site to manage it and post content.
The WordPress codex has a function called switch_to_blog() found here that allows you to switch to a certain site in your theme files to pull posts from that site and then switch back to the current site afterwords to continue with the usual content of the page.