presstoolWordpress has an amazing Bookmarklet / Front-End Publishing Tool built in that practically nobody knows about!  It’s called Press This. I’m sure you’ve all seen it in the Dashboard/Tools section but just didn’t really understand what it was.

Well, it’s undergone a major update since WordPress 4.2 and all of a sudden, the WordPress facebookurldevelopers ended up not only improving a great linking to articles and writing about them tool, but they, inadvertently, ended up creating a great front-end publishing tool as well!

What Press This does it what sites like Facebook do when you paste a URL in a post on them. When you paste a url in a Facebook post, Facebook goes out and grabs the summary and an image from the post and embeds them in the post and you can then go in and write more stuff before hitting post. Is this stealing?

Press This does all this through a cool bookmarklet as well. No need to cut and paste URLs, you simply click the bookmarklet when you are on an interesting article you want to write about and it does the rest.  It also acts as a great STAND-ALONE front-end editor which I will show you below.

I have added Press This to our UltimateMember profiles so that our members can link to, or write new articles that then appear on the site.

Here are some screenshots of it in action and I’ll show you further down how you can incorporate the same system into your site as well.

Hopefully, UltimateMember will incorporate Press This is a similar manner when they come out with their Front-End editor.

UltimateMember Button
Bookmarklet Setup
Post URL

 

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OK.. so here is how I incorporated this whole system into Underground Network.

1 Add a POST tab to the UltimateMember Profile with instructions.

post-button
In your functions.php file, add the following code (taken originally from UM Code Samples and customized):

2 Add a little CSS to your site to style these instructions:

 

3 Roles

Decide how you want people to become writers for the site. Should they be contributors? Authors? And based on that, you can make them have that role when they sign up and are approved by adding in the following code to your functions.php file.

Below, I make all approved members contributors, this is also taken from UltimateMember code samples. You can change ‘contributor’ to any other role.

4 Permissions

Permissions can be handled with a variety of plugins. One plugin I use that is phenomenal is: 

WP Users Media, which makes it so that people can only see their OWN media flies in the MEDIA directory. This is a good thing for security reasons. I think you just install the plugin and activate it and that’s it. It works.

I also use a paid series of plugins called:

PressPermit because with these plugins, I can make everyone an AUTHOR on my site, BUT restrict them to ONLY publish to a particular category, called USER POSTS. I can then only show those posts in a special USER POST area, unless I promote them to the homepage afterwards. You can also prevent them from using particular tags if you want, and so on.  PressPermit is kind of hard to configure, but the developer is very helpful when you run into configuration issues.

5 Conclusion

This solution works great because it mostly uses CORE WordPress functionality, but it also adds a cool ability for users to be able to post links to interesting articles from around the web and comment on them, which is what sites like Facebook allow you to do, so I like that added bonus.

Hopefully Calum at UltimateMember will look into using Press This functionality in the UM Front-End publisher when they build it. These instructions could get him about 99% of the way there if he wants! And he’s free to use any of this code 🙂

Any of you reading this, feel free to Sign up to be a Beta Tester to try this system out if you want, just let me know in the form that you are signing up for this reason so that I can activate your account.  Our site is not officially live yet, so I’ll need to know in order to activate you now.