Blog writing and publishing workflow with Scrivener

Scrivener Newcomer Central
1

Hi, I am a new Scrivener user, it´s a pleasure to be here. I have a blog where I publish weekly, and I was wondering what is the best system / workflow to write blogposts with Scrivener and then export them to WordPress. Is there a great Scrivener template to write and organize blogposts in Scrivener? Can the different section types in a document be automatically translated into HTML headings, subheadings, text, quotes, etc.? And what would be the best workflow to export them to WordPress (Markdown, htlm?). Any insights or resources about this will be most appreciated. Thank you.

2

Welcome @Emilio1.

First, question: have you gone through the tutorial you will find under the help menu? If not, I do recommend it as it gives you a grounding in Scrivener’s features and how it works, and the names for the different parts of the interface. It makes it much easier for everyone if you have any questions if you use the standard terms. If you have been through it, congratulations!

Second, advice: in your Account → Preferences → Profile, put your platform, as it helps us to know which you use as the interfaces are unavoidably slightly different.

Third, disclaimer: I’m a Mac user and have no experience of WordPress. I do use the “MultiMarkdown → webpage (html)” compile format, so my advice is to create a small test project, then try compiling using that to see if you need to tweak it in any way and come back to ask how.

I’m pretty sure there are people here who are doing what you want to do, Scrivener → WordPress. If you search for “WordPress” in the forum, it comes up with a lot of threads, but none of them seem very recent.

Hope that helps. :slight_smile:

Mark

3

Writing with Markdown in Scrivener is going to give you the best result for WordPress, in my opinion. The advantage is that the HTML is very clean, and will not try and override the overall theme of the blog design. Scrivener’s own HTML generator is very opinionated and will try its best to make the text look formatted. Fine for stuff where you are uploading a static .html page somewhere and you want to design it in Scrivener, but for CMS and blogs it’s not so good.

Here’s a very basic primer:

  1. In your project, create a new text item in your draft folder. Paste in or type up some Markdown formatted content.
  2. Open File ▸ Compile..., and on the right side, in the Contents pane, select “Current Selection” from the very bottom of the compile dropdown. This will make it so only the current “article” is compiled. This will probably remain your go-to setting for something like this, where a blog article is only going to be a small part of your draft.
  3. From the top, select “MultiMarkdown > HTML”, and select “Basic MultiMarkdown” as your compile format in the left sidebar.
  4. As you will see in the middle preview column, section layouts are simple. You basically only need to choose whether headings are generated or not. Scrivener will handle the depth for you. So if you have three levels of depth in your article, you’ll get “#” , “##” and “###” Markdown headers automatically.

And that’s pretty much it for the basics. There is a lot more you can do with this workflow though. If you want to dig into it, check out Chapter 21 in the user manual PDF. You can, for example, write using less Markdown if that isn’t your cup of tea.

4

Hi Mark, thank you for the nice welcome and the advice.

I had been through the whole tutorial and specified my platform (Windows) in my profile when I posted. Scrivener has so many options, but I think I have understood the basics of it . Now my challenge is to set it up for my specific needs, and start using it on a daily basis.

Thanks! :slightly_smiling_face:

Emilio

5

Hi Amber,

this is really helpful. I like the idea of writing with Markdown on Scrivener for WordPress. I have been doing a few tests, and compiling from Multimarkdown to Web Page (.html) does work. The only minor issue is that for some reason when choosing Basic Multimarkdown as the original format I can´t select Section Layouts. But I think this can be a simple and fast option to create my blogposts in Scrivener and publish them to WordPress.

Thank you! :slightly_smiling_face:

Emilio

6

Glad to hear it is working well for the most part.

The only minor issue is that for some reason when choosing Basic Multimarkdown as the original format I can´t select Section Layouts.

You should be able to! Could you describe what it is you are trying to do? I can’t think of any condition that would disable the Assign Section Layouts button, at the bottom of the preview column.

7

Hi Amber, what I meant is that the Assign Section Layouts are not clickable when I choose the Basic MultiMarkdown under format. This is a screenshot of the Compile window: Compile Overview & C__Users...
But otherwise it is working fine. Thank you :slight_smile:

8

You have to click on where it says “Assign Section Layouts” at the bottom.

:smile:

Mark

10

Thank you, I see what you mean! I am afraid I´ll be running into a few issues like this one before I am more acquainted with the software. :sweat_smile: