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WPTavern Now Taking Submissions

WPTavern Now Taking Submissions

By Jeffro on June 12, 2009

guestpostsubmissionSince the launch of the Tavern, one of the ideas I had in mind for this place was to build up an audience but also, to share the stage with whomever wanted to share it with me. So far, I’ve accepted guest posts from a couple of individuals and I am grateful for those who have submitted any posts considering they are some of the most popular pieces of content on this site. While emailing the HTML is fine for getting your post to me, a better solution would be to provide access to my write panel without actually getting access to it.

Thanks to Michael Torbert who is the author of the All In One SEO Pack plugin, I now have a guest post submission form that when a post is accepted, shows up in my write panel as a draft. I also receive an email notification that contains certain fields from the form so I can tell via email if it’s a legitimate, or fake attempt. This post submission form was custom made for WPTavern but there is a small chance that Michael may make this a public plugin.

As it stands, the submission box is using something similar to the visual editor you would find in the WordPress write panel. At some point in the future, I believe we will try to replace this editor with something similar to the one found in the Comment Quicktags plugin. I know most of you are not keen on using the visual editor but if you so desire, just use your own write panel to write the post and when you’re finished, copy and paste it into my submission editor, check the right category and send it off. Unfortunately, you can’t upload images using this editor. For now, just send your images to me via email and make sure to place a bit of text within your post that matches with the image name so I know where to put it. Also, I’ll be adding the custom Guest Post Author box which I use on every guest post to place more emphasis on the author.

Right now, I’d love it if anyone with knowledge of WPMU, bbPress, or BuddyPress would step up to the plate and share a bit of their knowledge with the Tavern audience. Unlike most other WordPress centric sites which sometimes have a focused usergroup, the audience around the tavern is made up of theme authors, plugin authors and typical end users giving you a variety of options to explain a topic.

If you encounter any bugs or mishaps with the submission form, contact me via email or through the forum and we’ll get them sorted out.

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Easy Way To Highlight Guest Posts

Easy Way To Highlight Guest Posts

By Jeffro on May 9, 2009

If you’ve read a guest post on this site recently, you may have noticed a special block I created just for them which is styled differently than the rest of the post. The block contains information about the author of the post, an avatar image and a link to the URL of their choosing. This way, I give the reader clear indication that the post they are reading is not mine. I know you’re just dieing to see how I accomplished this little feat so let’s get onto the code snippets.

Back in late April, I inquired on the forum if anyone had any experience or plugin suggestions regarding highlighting guest blog post authors. I was hoping to find a plugin that would add a div box which pulled in a users gravatar via their email address while I manually filled out the content in each post. I didn’t come across anything like that but thanks to the members of the forum, they offered a way in which I could add some CSS to my themes style sheet and then wrap the guest author content within that Div class so it would be styled accordingly.

Here is the CSS code I added to me theme. 

.guestposter {

	border: 1px solid #dddddd;
	padding-bottom: 16px;
	display: block;
	margin-bottom: 20px;
	font-style:italic;
	background: #E9E4D4;
	
	}
	
.img-gravatar{
       float:left;
	margin-right: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 0px;

	}

Once this was added to my style sheet, I was able to manually assign the guestposter class to a block of content which dealt with the guest post author.

alt textThis is a guest blog post written by My WordPress, author of the blog, WordPress.

Of course, just substitute the code with your own stuff and you should be all set. I don’t publish guest posts that often so copying and then pasting this code snippet isn’t too bad.

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