Do you regularly collect content from the web to post on a WordPress-based website? If so, consider using the PressForward plugin to make the process simpler and more efficient. In this blog post, I will describe my experience of using the plugin to create a new post on the Sociology PhD Program’s CUNY Academic Commons site.
For starters, PressForward is a free WordPress plugin that helps you centralize news or information that is of interest to you in one place. It is an extremely useful tool if you frequently gather information from various web sources and republish them. When gathering the sources, you can use the RSS reader function provided by the plugin or use the “Nominate This” bookmarklet while browsing the web. This blog post will focus on the “Nominate This” bookmarklet, which I find most helpful when creating new content for the website I manage.
Simply put, the “Nominate This” bookmarklet lets you select static page content that you want to transform into a new post on your WordPress website. Once you select the content of a page, the plugin generates a pop-up window where you can edit the content and send it to your WordPress dashboard as a draft. Then, you can publish the post on your website the way you want it by selecting different images and/or changing the format. Detailed instructions on how to install this bookmarklet can be found here. Below, I show how I grab content from the web and turn it into a new post as an example.
Step 1: Once I find the content I want to republish, I click the “Nominate This” icon from my bookmark bar and select the blue “Send to Draft” button from a new pop-up window. Then, I get a confirmation message saying that my post has been saved as a draft.
* Note that you must be logged in to the dashboard where you want to send the draft post in order to use the “Nominate This” function.
Step 2: I go to my dashboard to make some edits, such as changing the title, adjusting the format, and selecting appropriate categories. Although the Pressforward plugin does an excellent job of generating the same content as a WordPress post, it sometimes requires a human touch to make the content more reader-friendly. Once the minor editing part is done, the post is ready to go.
I find that there are two major pros of using the “Nominate This” bookmarklet. First, it allows me to quickly generate a new post with just a couple of clicks. This prevents me from manually copying and pasting the original content to a draft post in my dashboard and saves a lot of time! Second, it automatically adds the source where I retrieved the original content at the bottom of the post (see the picture below) so that I don’t have to add that information manually. This is very useful when I am simply republishing the same content on the website.
If there is more than one administrator of the website you manage, all of them can use the “Nominate This” bookmarklet to create new content easily from their own browser at the same time. If you haven’t used the PressForward plugin before, I strongly recommend you give it a try. It will make your WordPress content managing way faster and more convenient.
