If you’re not using Jetpack, well… you should be using Jetpack. Jetpack is a free suite of plugins from Automattic (those WordPress creators) that has plenty of essential plugins that are lightweight and add value rather than bloat. Among its many tools is a feature to post from a secret email account.
This one creates an email address when you enable the post by email feature (it’s not enabled by default). This is the address you will send your emails to. The address can be changed if you ever need to. Just go back to the button where you enabled the feature and click Regenerate Address. I think it has unlimited regenerations (I always wanted unlimited regenerations).
Developing the post is simple. It uses the subject line as the post title. It will keep as much of the formatting as possible, so you can use HTML if your email client uses rich text or HTML formatting. You can also send plain text if you don’t want to specify any formatting. You can post from any email client. Note – If you’re using a web-based client such as Hotmail or Gmail, or a desktop based system such as Outlook, then you already have a rich text formatting mode.
The post will automatically remove the signatures from clients such as Hotmail and Gmail, and anything after the <hr/> HTML tag for cellphone networks. You can also use a shortcode within your email to remove any unwanted signatures.
There are plenty of other shortcodes that you can embed within your email to format your post. You can use them to:
- Choose the category
- Choose tags
- Set an excerpt
- Set a more tag
- Delay the publishing by one hour
- Turn comments on and off
- Set the published status (published, pending, or draft)
- Setup a slideshow
- Turn the gallery off (the gallery is automatically turned on by default)
- Set publicize options (it will send notifications to both Facebook and Twitter)
- Set up a poll for Polldaddy
- Next page
- Slug
- Title (if you want to specify something other than the email title)
You can include images as attachments. A single image will be displayed inline. Multiple images will automatically be set as a gallery unless you provide a shortcode to remove the gallery. This is a superfast way to create a gallery. Simply take a ton of photos and attach them to an email. Done. And easy.
Jetpack is super easy to use, but I have a few issues with it. First, only one address is provided. This is great for one person, but what if you have a team with each member having their own account? This means that every email sent will automatically be labeled as being posted by the administrator.
Second, only one social network can be used with Publicize if you post each network in a separate shortcode. You can send it to both Facebook and Twitter in a single shortcode, but you can’t use separate shortcodes. Why do I care about this? I might want to use templates for my email with shortcodes already posted. This just means I have to use more than one template or I have to include all of the shortcodes and pay close attention to which shortcodes to delete. If I didn’t this would reduce the functionality of Jetpack and take away one of the advantages of Publicize. It’s easy enough to make it work correctly, but it is something to be aware of.
Still, these issues are not enough to keep me from using it. This is a great way to create a full-featured post from your email account. The shortcodes and HTML functions ensure that the posts will look great on your site and not look like you created them in an email.