evaluating Scrivener for publishing book on WordPress maybe

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Hi,
I haven’t settled on WordPress, or Scrivener, or much of anything. My “requirements” may be unreasonable, but here they are:

  • I need a platform for writing a book, with sections and references and research and notes.
  • I want to publish the book to the web incrementally as it progresses. The web version should have a single section on each page and attractive, flexible navigation across chapters and sections. It should also allow comments using software with decent security and spam-prevention.
  • I want to be able to publish the book as some form of paper or ebook eventually.
  • I want to be able to extract content (not necessarily notes/research) to a decent, non-proprietary format.

I’m currently thinking to compose in Scrivener, output to HTML, import into WordPress – but it may not work for a couple reasons:

  • If I edit already published content in Scrivener, I can’t publish it again in any automated way to WordPress without blowing away comments. But if I edit on Wordpress, then I won’t have the changes in Scrivener, where I really want them.
  • Scrivener export/compile options all seem to export to a single, large file rather than to individual files that could be imported to WordPress as pages. Maybe I can get around this by running some script that splits output into smaller files.

Any advice about how to do what I’m hoping for?
Thanks!
Sigfried

2

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply. One thing you can do is use the Edit > Copy Special options to copy your text out of a Scrivener document as HTML, and then just paste it into your WordPress page. Or you can use File > Export > Files… and choose HTML, as that exports your documents as individual files (it is File > Compile… that compiles them all into a single file).

Hope that helps.

All the best,
Keith

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As for editing, why not just edit in Scrivener and then use copy special to edit the post on WordPress?

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I had to do a similar evaluation. In my case I decided to use both.

For dynamic “real time” content the foundation of my CRM system is Wordpress.

As the content becomes more static with intent to re-purpose into book publication I migrate content to new Scrivener Project(s) with link references to past WP posts and other relevant content (mindmaps, Evernotes, Office, wiki, web, docs, etc. etc.)

With both in my arsenal, it also allows me to start the process off with Scrivener, migrate as described above to WP as needed and as appropriate re-purpose back to Scrivener to complete the cycle.

L