Postie for the WordPress Designer
The time that it takes to log into your WordPress site and add you latest daily – weekly post can be daunting if you are responsible for posting to multiple sites.
Postie helps solve this task. The idea is both simple and yet powerful.
Why not simply email your post to your WordPress website. One factor in SEO ratings, is the activity on your site. New content is king in keeping visitors returning . This plugin makes regular posting information to your site a simple routine.
After entering information for each Postie option be sure to click on the “Save changes” button at the bottom of the screen.
The Steps to getting Postie setup
1 First download, install and activate the plugin.
2 Create a special email address for your domain. This is the email that postie will use to check for posts. An example might be like this: 8yC7kJJ765tTbqQQwzplLL@yourdomain.com or like this KKKn675TvFfkjM98ZZAcCE43d@yourdomain.com. You will need this address to complete the plugin setup.
3 After completing step #2, select Setting from the Postie Plugins listing –
4 These are the Option Headings for the Postie plugin
5 The Mailserver options are the most important options for the plugin. The complete list as of this posting are shown here. In Step 6 we will show the most important server settings.
6. The most important Server Settings for Postie. The email that you created for this plugin is highlighted in Yellow and the password that you created for this email address is entered in the Mail Password field.
7. After completing the server setup, it is necessary to enter the site users that can post via email. The options screen has a USER tab to accomplish this, which is shown here. Only the email addresses entered will be able to post and only the user roles that have been checked. Be sure to select NO in the “anyone can post” option.
8 The next Postie settings deal with the email Message itself. Most of these are straight forward with 2 exceptions which I have noted here. The first is a setting to determine if the post is auto published or held for approval (Pending). This setting allows the admin to approve each email post until the sender is comfortable with the process. The second setting that should be noted is what character should be used to indicate that what is enclosed inside these characters is the “category” of the post. In the example below the delimiting character is the square bracketed . So for [SEO Workshop] the category for the post would be SEO Workshop.
9 The example email below shows the CATEGORY in square brackets in the Subject area, and the actual subject (which will be the Title of the post) on the first line of the email inside of the # symbols. The approved email account is in the red area and the special email address in the TO of the email.
10 The plugin has a number of paid add-on extensions to the product that can be purchased on their site. This is a simple list of those available.
Code Word AddOn Newsletter Fixer AddOn Create Categories AddOn
Support AddOn Subscribe to Category AddOn Postie Shortcodes AddOn
Category Per User AddOn Clean HTML AddOn Polylang AddOn
Geolocation Plus AddOn Images Only AddOn Open Street Maps AddOn
11 Here is different eMail example that includes an image. The image will be used as the “Featured Image” for the post.
Summary:
Pros
After 3 yrs of use we have not had any issues
It takes less than 20 minutes to set up
It is free
The Add-on extensions are not expensive
Cons
On a few occasions it was out of sync with the latest WP version.