Have you wanted to plan out a series of blog posts over a period of time? Or have you wanted to see when a number of different authors plan to publish their blog posts? Or have you just wanted to see visually when posts to your blog were published?
The Plugin
By way of Chris Brogan’s blog I learned of a great plugin for WordPress called “Editorial Calendar” that does exactly that. Once installed, you have a new “Calendar” menu choice in the left sidebar (in your admin interface).
When you click on that Calendar link, you will now see a traditional calendar view (seen below) of a period of weeks that shows you all of your:
- already published posts
- scheduled posts that will be published
- scheduled draft posts
The scheduled draft posts are interested because they will not be published unless you go in and then change them from “Draft” status. What’s nice about this is that you can go in and set up a whole series of draft blog posts and see them visually… but yet they won’t be published until you actually edit the text and schedule them.
What is also cool is that you can create new posts directly from this calendar interface. So if you decide that you want to have a series of three posts coming up on the next 3 Mondays, you can go in right from this calendar view and set up the posts for those days. You can enter complete posts – or simply create blank stub posts that are placeholders until you can enter the rest of the text.
You also can move posts from one day to another simply by dragging the scheduled posts around in the calendar interface.
By clicking on the “Screen Options” link toward the upper right of the page, you can also configure the plugin to display the author of a particular blog post. All in all it works rather well:
Using It With WordPress MU
I’ve installed the plugin here on blogs.voxeo.com and activated it across our various blogs. So far it is working great and I’ve seen no issues with it with our WPMU 2.9.2 install.
Now, it sets up a calendar for each individual blog. What would be a cool enhancement would be if it were available at the Site Admin level and could show you your posts scheduled across all blogs in a WordPress network of blogs.
The use case would be for a blog portal like this one. As the overall manager of the site, I would like to ensure that we have a new post coming out every day on at least one of our blogs. I’d love a plugin like this that would give me a macro view that could show me what is scheduled across all our blogs. I could then go into days when we don’t have content scheduled and create some new posts.
While that would be a cool enhancement for network sites, as it is alone it’s a great help and I’m very pleased to have found it. You, too, can install it from its plugin page if you would like to add this functionality to your site.
P.S. I also wrote about this plugin on my external Disruptive Conversations blog.
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