Blogging Expertise

I’ve been working with Debbie Weil recently to simplify the process of publishing her monthly e-newsletter. It’s been a big pain in the past, involving code editing, FTP transfers, and a lot of steps that Debbie didn’t like doing each month.

We came up with a reasonably innovative solution, and I wrote up a short non-technical overview for the current issue of her e-newsletter (which is using this solution). Imagine my surprise when the comments on the post took off and folks started asking for more info!

Because it is an interesting topic, and because people want to know, I’m posting the details here. However, it’s reasonably technical and probably more for WordPress developers than the average blogger, so if it doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip on by. (Or if you want this feature, but don’t want to know the technical details, you can contact us!)

Ready, aim…

The goal was to make the newsletter articles more like blog posts. Blogs have so many great features (like comments, RSS feeds, and great search engine attraction) that newsletters don’t typically take advantage of. It wasn’t a big leap to decide to make the individual e-newsletter articles WordPress posts. The difficulty was in figuring out a way to use posts to store the articles without adding any more steps or complication to the process of publishing the e-newsletter.

Enter the glorious feature that is WordPress Pages. Pages are a very useful, very versatile tool built into WordPress, and they were exactly what we needed in this case. With Pages, the blog author has the ability to pick a specific design (a template file) for a Page. Theoretically, each Page could have a completely different design if desired (I’ve done some blog sites like this!).

Enough overview; how does it work?

The first step was to create a custom template file, a design just for the e-newsletter. This began with just deciding how the newsletter should look, and then we focused on how the e-newsletter should work.

Here’s how the system is designed to be used:

1. Whenever Debbie writes a new article for her e-newsletter, she enters it into WordPress as a post. She assigns it to a special category that is exclusively used for the e-newsletter (she can assign it to other categories as well).
2. When all of the articles are entered, Debbie creates a new Page within WordPress. For organization purposes, she gives it a specific page parent, and most importantly, sets the Page Template to the design I have created for this purpose. The title of the Page becomes the title of the issue of the e-newsletter.
3. Debbie enters the issue’s “start date” as a custom field. This tells the Page how far back to look for articles/posts.
4. Optionally, she can enter a “newsletter date” as a custom field. This allows her to create the e-newsletter a day or two before sending it, and still have the date show up properly.

Within the special e-newsletter template, I used standard WordPress functions (The Loop, the_title(), etc.). I needed to pull a few tricks to go through The Loop more than once (first for the Table of Contents, then again for the article excerpts) and to limit the posts to just one designated category.

I’m currently using the_excerpt_reloaded plugin to grab the article excerpts (it has more options than the standard WordPress the_excerpt()). We may switch this in the future to more thoroughly use WordPress’s “more” Quicktag.

From a programming perspective, this is essentially how the template works:

1. The categoryID is defined and the current page ID is stored as a variable.
2. The various custom fields are retrieved to determine start and end dates for the issue.
3. The Loop is called with a custom query to get all posts that are in the e-newsletter category and fall within the appropriate date range. These are then listed as the Table of Contents, and later, the article excerpts.
4. After each article, some conditional logic is performed to display specific ads in specific slots.

There is, of course, a lot more to it than this, but this is the foundation, and if you’re a WordPress developer, you should be able to build something similar based on this info. I’m toying with the idea of turning it into a plugin, so if this interests you, leave a comment. Questions? Leave a comment and I’ll do my best to clarify.