reformatting post by e-mail entries in wordpress

May 6, 2010 8:21 AM

Technical Wordpress question. I want to post machine-generated e-mails to a Wordpress blog via e-mail, and reformat them before they go live.

I've got an iPhone app that can send updates via e-mail that I want to post to a blog. The updates follow a template that is predictable but not editable.

Wordpress can fetch e-mail and post it as a blog entry, but doesn't give a lot of control over that process.

Since the messages do follow a predictable format, it should be possible to intervene somewhere and apply some search/replace patterns to reformat them the way I want.

Is there a plugin in existence that will do this? Failing that, I know just enough about PHP to get myself into trouble, so I might take a stab at it myself in anyone can point me in the right direction.

posted by adamrice to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Since most wordpress plugins deal with displaying content, not creating posts, it's probably best to ignore that route.

If you have control over the server (or some machine that can access and send email), this is what you could do:

1) have your phone send mail to account A.
2) have your blog read mail and post from account B.
3) write some php script without any wordpress knowledge, but have it read form A, reformat, and send to B.

The script from step 3 could be called by your mail delivery agent if you have that much control over your server, or it could fetch the mail itself (there's plenty of pop3 code in php to pick form)
posted by DreamerFi at 9:22 AM on May 6, 2010

from A, not form, of course.
posted by DreamerFi at 9:23 AM on May 6, 2010