- WordPress Top Plugins
- Brandon Corbin
- 772字
- 2025-03-31 06:08:59
By Guillermo Rauch (http://devthought.com/)
- Why it's awesome: Great for automatically pulling content from your other blogs or online applications
- Why it was picked: Flexibility and data import consistency
- Manual Install URL:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-o-matic/
- Automatic Install search term: WP-O-Matic
- Geek level: WordPress Ninja
- Configuration location: Settings | WP-O-Matic
- Used in: Posts
WP-O-Matic is used to automatically create posts from an RSS or ATOM feed. This plugin is by far one of the more complicated plugins available, but insanely powerful. Imagine being able to take content from any website virtually, and automatically add it to your blog every time it is updated. With this plugin, you could hypothetically build a gigantic blog filled with tons of content, without ever manually posting.
Before you can begin, there are a few steps you need to go through to ensure that you have all of the right software available for this plugin to work. The first time you visit Settings | WP-O-Matic, you will be asked to click through a series of configuration options.
The first step makes sure that you have the right SimplePie installed. SimplePie is a wonderful piece of software that makes consuming RSS and ATOM feeds very easy.
The second step allows you to select how automatic updates will occur; your options are using a CRON job or a pseudo-automatic process. The CRON job does require you to do some server magic in the SHELL. For those of you who have no idea what that last sentence meant, uncheck the box at the end of the second step.
In WP-O-Matic, a campaign is a collection of feeds (or a single feed) that will be imported into a specific area that you define. For example, let's say you want to create a new category dedicated to news about Space. Then you would create a new campaign called "Space news" that would contain multiple RSS feeds from other websites and blogs that write about Space. Then, on a schedule which you define, WP-O-Matic will automatically grab the latest news and create a post for each new item in the feed.
The Feeds tab is where you will define each of the RSS or ATOM feeds you would like to include in your newly created campaign. WP-O-Matic has a great feature if you are unsure what the RSS feed is for a given website; all you have to do is provide the website's URL. For example, enter http://universetoday.com, and WP-O-Matic will automatically locate the websites' feed for you.
Each campaign has a slew of options available during import. The following is a breakdown of what each of the options will do.
- Custom Post Template: When WP-O-Matic is importing the text of a feed, you have the option of adding additional content to the post. This is helpful if you want to add a "Read More" link to the end of the post or include additional details about the feed.
- Frequency: By default, WP-O-Matic checks for new posts every day and a half. To change this to a different time delay, simply provide the number of days, hours, and minutes.
- Cache Images: Many times, feeds have images embedded in them. This setting automatically downloads the files to your own server. In this way, if the original publisher of the post deletes or changes an image, your blog still displays the original post images.
- Perform Ping Back: A Ping Back is a way to automatically notify another blog that you referenced one of their posts on your blog. If checked, the Perform Ping Back will automatically "ping" the blog post that WP-O-Matic adds to your blog. It's recommended that you check this option to give proper attribution for the posts you are importing.
- Type of Post: By default, new posts will automatically be published. You can change this setting by selecting either "draft" or "private".
- Max items to create on each fetch: Change the Max Items number if you want to import more than ten posts each time WP-O-Matic goes to work. Setting this number to 0 will import the maximum items in a feed.
- Post title link to Source: When a post is imported, you can either link the headline to the post on your blog or send the user directly to the original blog that posted the article.
- Discussion Options: Use the Discussion Options drop-down box to turn public commenting on or off.