I am managing a couple of WordPress sites, all hosted on the same VPS, and the client would like the homepage blogroll of Site A, that the own, to appear on Site B that the also own with the same Author attribution, preferably to link to the originating sites author as opposed to a duped author on Site B.
I was thinking of either querying the database on Site B with a replica query_posts() query however I am having trouble reverse engineering the query_posts() function.
Is there a way to do this for an ‘external’ site?
NB; sites are not multisite. I tried that but it all dropped off and a critical plugin we need is not compatible.
You have a couple of options here, but first let me advise you away from querying the database directly. If your sites are that closely related, then they should be in a Multisite network …
RSS
On Site B, fetch the RSS of Site A and display the posts and author attributions there. You can find any number of RSS plugins that do this for you or just get you started.
XML-RPC
Site B can also connect to Site A to fetch the latest posts using XML-RPC. You then have full access to data, including the most recent posts, as well as media, comments, etc.