Customized Write Post Page

  • I am the host of a podcast, and we power our website with WordPress. Four nights each week we post up a new episode. However, it’s actually pretty annoying to re-type the same data that often. It’s especially annoying because much of that data could be automatically filled in based on the date and time and such.

    What I would like to do is write some sort of plugin that adds a button to the write post form that causes some of the fields to be automatically filled in. If that doesn’t work, then I would like to create a duplicate of the write post form that has data automatically filled in.

    I’m a proficient PHP programmer, it’s how I make my living, but I’ve never made a WordPress plugin. I’m really just looking for someone to point me in the right direction. I thought about writing a separate app that would post via XMLRPC, but the API doesn’t seem to give us the flexibility to set custom fields and such that we need. I also looked through the WP plugin API, but I couldn’t find the functions that create new posts.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter apreche

    (@apreche)

    Never mind, I figured it out. I just made a copy of edit-form-advanced.php into my plugin. I just rename it and modify it, and I’m good to go. I’m just posting this here for the sake of anyone else who comes looking.

    Thanks for posting your solution. I’m not as proficient at PHP as you, but I might take a look at doing something like that too.

    Out of curiosity, do you use PodPress or another plugin for your podcast, or you just manually create mp3 enclosures on your posts?

    Thread Starter apreche

    (@apreche)

    We don’t use any special plugins to create enclosures. We simply add a custom field to each podcast post with a key of “enclosure” with the URL of the mp3 as the value. Usually WordPress makes the enclosure on its own automatically without needing a custom field, but not always. Adding the custom field guarantees that it will happen correctly every time.

    We then use multiple categories to create feeds that contain just the right episodes we want. Our podcast currently has 6 different feeds for listeners to choose from. We filter all the feeds through FeedBurner to make sure the feeds are working, to track subscriber numbers, to offload stress on the server, etc.

    Actually, I just ran into a problem. Using my method of creating a plugin by copying the edit-form-advanced.php into a plugin is not as perfect as it first appeared to be. While I am able to automatically fill in the title and post fields, there seems to be no way for me to automatically modify the categories or custom fields on the form. These areas on the form are generated by internal WordPress functions that I can’t seem to override or hook into. My only choice seems to be to re-implement those functions. Please tell me there is an easier way.

    I don’t know anything about making plugins

    but I think there is, believe it or not, a plugin for making plugins? there’s some kind of template thing out there that helps people turn code into plugins

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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