Tech Hive

Blogging through email has to be one of the unused features in WordPress, I have never even thought of using it until now. Well, I’m not really the one who needs it, Connie will be away for some time and she needs to blog because she’s addicted to it (hehe). Naturally, when you’re out in the open, wifi signals can’t reach you, and who would actually want to bring their laptops on a vacation, right?

I thought that the easiest way is for a plugin, it’s a little hard to find though what with the other send post to a friend type of plugins around. Good thing is I found a good article in wordpress’ codex about the topic which is fairly easy to understand.

So to be able to post an entry via email in wordpress, here’s what you need to do and keep in mind:

1. Create an email address on your server where the login is known only to you. This is important because every email sent to this address will be posted on your blog.
2. After creating the account, go in to your wordpress admin panel, select options, then writing. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the Post via email header. Put all of the needed credentials in the form there such as your username, password and the mail server. In most cases, you don’t have to change the port and the mail servers are usually mail.domainname.com. You can also set the default category where the posts should go.

   

3. Send an email to that account.
4. Then run (or load) WP-mail.php into your browser like so: http://yourdomainname.com/wordpress-folder/wp-mail.php or if you installed it in your root folder: http://yourdomainname.com/wp-mail.php. It will then look for a message that is within the account you specified in step 2. If it have some messages in it, it’ll show the title, the sender of the mail (which will always be you, duh) and the action it took in your browser.

   What it will do is retrieve the message and file it under the category you specified in step 2. Then it will flag the message as published and delete that message from your server. The message should be deleted because otherwise, it will be posted again and again in your blog.

And that’s all there is to it!

Well… there’s a catch though. You cannot send an email using a rich text editor. Well, technically you can but the downside of doing so is that your post will not contain any content in it but will only show the title. For some reason, the body of your message will only be shown if you’re using a plain text editor.