What format is best for content that will end up in Wordpress?

October 11, 2009 3:48 PM

in what format should I have contributors submit pieces to be posted later in wordpress?

I'm running a sort of magazine website built on Wordpress, and I'm acting as publisher. I don't want to ask the contributors to log in and write their own posts, partly because I don't want anyone to post anything unfinished by accident, and partly because many of the contributors don't have much experience with HTML formatting.

I'm willing to do all the back-end work myself, but I've been trying to figure out what format to ask the authors to write in. I get submissions in various formats now... in Word and pasted directly in email being the two most common formats.

There are two main problems:

1) If I copy and paste directly into the Visual WP editor, then the document always retains formatting that I don't want, and I have to go into the HTML editor and pick it out, which is tedious.

2) If I copy and paste directly into the HTML editor, I lose some formatting that I want to keep, such as boldface and italics. Then I have to go back through the document and apply the proper formatting to everything that needs to be bolded or italicized, which is tedious.

So far, there's only one way I've found to do it quickly, which is to paste the text into Word, then save as an RTF, then copy and paste from the RTF into the WP Visual editor. However, my mac just died and I'm on my backup computer, a netbook with no optical drive, and I don't have Word, nor do I want to deal with getting an external optical drive to install Word. I have OpenOffice. But (learning experience) .rtf files in OpenOffice retain formatting that .rtf files made in Word do not. So that doesn't work.

Surely, this is not an uncommon problem? How do other people solve it?

posted by bingo to computers & internet (16 comments total)

You'd want to enable the "WP Visual editor" (usually tinymce) to be a bit more smart about the stuff it copies in. This guy wrote the "default corporate options" and how to install on wordpress a plugin which parses the pasted text and allows you to specify what formatting you want to keep (bold, size) and what you want to throw away (those damn linespaces, in my experience).
posted by sleslie at 4:05 PM on October 11 [1 favorite]

The default method for this is to take submissions in Word format to avoid the line breaks of email and have full formatting options. Take the Word document, paste it into Notepad to strip out Word's funky invisible formatting, and paste that into WordPress.

Yes, you do need to reformat bullet points, bold, etc. but yeah, that's how I do it.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:49 PM on October 11

"I don't want to ask the contributors to log in and write their own posts, partly because I don't want anyone to post anything unfinished by accident, and partly because many of the contributors don't have much experience with HTML formatting."

You can set up people's accounts on Wordpress so that they do not have publishing privileges, and their posts all exist in a "pending" state until you approve them. You can do that by setting their role to "Contributor", not "Editor" or "Author". (See here for more on this.) There is no fear that they will accidentally post something if you do this.

Additionally, Wordpress has the visual editor, so posters should not need to know HTML.

On our neighborhood blog, we have given some contributors "Contributor" access, and it works nicely -- I just go in and tweak the formatting if needed, add tags, etc. and then click the Publish button. The only flaw in the system is that, as far as I can tell, I can't make WordPress email me when a contributor posts a new Pending post, and I don't always notice that there is a new one, so I ask contributors to email me when they have a post ready to go.
posted by litlnemo at 4:58 PM on October 11

DarlingBri, the OP is on a Mac (so no Notepad) and doesn't have Word, according to the post.
posted by litlnemo at 4:59 PM on October 11

(Oh, actually on a netbook without Word. Maybe the Mac has Word, but it is broken, apparently.)
posted by litlnemo at 5:00 PM on October 11

I've contributed to a wordpress-based magazine in the past. The publisher has it set up so contributors log in to wordpress and get to write their own story in the wordpress editor. But, the settings are such that the publisher must review all stories before they can even be published. As a contributor, all you can see are the "write a new post" page and your particular user profile. Worked pretty well.
posted by msbrauer at 5:04 PM on October 11

The problem with the "contributor" method is that, in my view, it just passes the problem along to the contributors. These posts are usually essays over 1,500 words long, carefully crafted over many days or weeks. Nobody is going to sit there and compose the content directly in the back end. So they'll just end up pasting it from whatever editor they're using, and we're back to where we started.

I suppose I could promote the use of MarsEdit or similar, though I would really rather find a solution that doesn't require the contributors to learn something completely new.
posted by bingo at 5:32 PM on October 11

OK you can open Word documents in Open Office, in that case, and use... whatever the plain text editor for Macs is.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:09 PM on October 11

DarlingBri, what you describe is already basically what I'm doing. But I'm looking for something better. I don't want to have to go through and re-format all the bolds and italics.
posted by bingo at 6:26 PM on October 11

Why not just ask people to submit stuff in RTF? Every word processor ever made can generate the stuff, and because it's a mostly sane text based format, it's fairly easily parsable and convertable and can't host viruses.
posted by flabdablet at 6:33 PM on October 11

Use Microsoft Live Writer, or the comparable setting in the newest Word, and post through the XMLRPC port [which has to be activied in the Wordpress settings nowadays].
posted by ijsbrand at 12:20 AM on October 12

I don't have Word, and as noted above, RTF files opened with OpenOffice contain code that I want to strip out.
posted by bingo at 6:40 PM on October 15

MS uses it's own internal code to make bold and italic (and to set fonts and colours.) There is no way to strip out that rubbish code whilst preserving the formatting changes it makes. Sorry.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:05 PM on October 15

Well... Yes there is. It's done by saving the file as an RTF in Word. I know this from experience. But I don't have Word.

Hm, apparently I didn't write the question very clearly.
posted by bingo at 10:48 PM on October 15

I have OpenOffice. But (learning experience) .rtf files in OpenOffice retain formatting that .rtf files made in Word do not. So that doesn't work.

as noted above, RTF files opened with OpenOffice contain code that I want to strip out

I had understood from that that making RTF files with OpenOffice on your end gives you indigestible results. What I'm suggesting is that you ask your contributors to send you their own work as RTF files, which likely as not they will be using Word to generate. So you'd end up with RTF files made with Word, not made with OOo, which if I understand you correctly should be OK.
posted by flabdablet at 11:49 PM on October 15

Textsoap may be able to help with at least part of your problem.
posted by mattliddy at 2:36 PM on November 10