I’m returning to Scrivener after spending a year with Ulysses. One of the things I liked about that program was the ability to directly publish to my Wordpress blog.
I know that Scrivener does not have this capability, so I was wondering what the bloggers here using Scriver do. I.e., after writing a blog post in Scrivener, what’s your process/workflow for getting the Scrivener text into your blog?
Thus far I’ve tried cutting and pasting, exporting as a Word file and then importing, exporting as HTML, etc… While I can get each of these methods to work, I’m hoping there’s a better way. Ideas?
Hoping for thoughts on how might like to write in Scrivener for WordPress, as well as how we do it now!
To me, the ideal WordPress input is a stripped, simplified HTML with just a few allowed tags. Scriv’s HTML generator adds way too much inline styling. If only Scrivener’s BBCode generator weren’t so impaired, its output would be a great model for a WordPress-friendly Copy Special.
Timely post! After my review of Ulysses, I’ve been a little unsettled with my own blogging practices. My blog readership is modest (500 reads per week according to Google) but growing as I invest more time into it.
Currently I use Markdown and a static-site generator and while I automate most of the publishing workflow, I have wondered in idle moments if writing it in Scrivener (to have a single project bucket) would be a better writing experience. If I did that, I’d be open to switching to another platform.
TL;DR - I’m really interested too in how bloggers who write in Scrivener manage their production side
Thank you for posting this topic. Much of my journalism these days starts in Scrivener but most of my WordPressed work starts out in iAWriter, which integrates pretty easily with WP. Other WP-destined pieces start in Google Docs or Pages, for various reasons having to do with editing or collaboration.
However, I’d like to use Scrivener for even these short WP pieces, and therefore I’d love some advice about how to make it play better with WP than current laughably primitive, needlessly complicated, and pathetically indolent (i.e. I’m too lazy to figure out how to improve it, especially since I use Scrivener and WP together so rarely) method:
write in Scrivener,
export to .rtf,
open in Pages or TextEdit,
Copy and paste into the WP editor
View as text in the WP editor and copy all text
Paste that copied html text back into Pages/TextEdit
find-and-replace the italic < i > (I’m using extra spaces here to prevent the forum editor from using these in actually formatting this post) with < em > so that the italics will actually show up when the story posts
Copy-and-paste this text back into the WP editor in text view.
Format subheadings and other final formatting, add title, subtitle, keywords and other metadata, photos, video etc., all in the WP editor rather than in Scrivener
Preview, make final corrections, publish (yes, three steps but 10 is a rounder number).
Stupid, right? There’s got to be an easier way, probably involving Markdown, exporting to HTML, etc. I’m told that wordpress.com allows you to import a properly formatted Markdown file, but our WordPress.org site, at least, doesn’t offer that option. But my formatting needs are so basic (really just italics and on a rare occason bold face, which has to be converted from < b > to < strong >) and I use Scrivener with WP so seldom that I’ve just never bothered to learn to do it more efficiently.
Please forgive my ignorance and indolence, which I blush to confess here. I would love a step-by-step guide for getting a story written in Scrivener into WordPressable form in as few steps as possible. Save me from my own stupidity, fellow Scriveners!
There is a Vim plugin written in Python (here) which uses Pandoc and Wordpress XML RPC API, so there would be no reason why this couldn’t be modified to work from a folder directly. In this case, you would compile in Scrivener to a specified folder and the script would trigger to use the API directly. This of course depends on someone to write this script to make this all work, but the parts are all in place for what could be a very elegant workflow…
In the meantime, or for those averse to fiddling too much (Marked 2 is macOS only I’m afraid) — why not use Markdown in Scrivener + Marked 2 with a live project; Marked 2 generates well formed HTML in real time as you edit in Scrivener. You could even use the CSS from your site so you will see the same “look” as the final post. You then copy-paste / import this HTML directly?
I’m new to Scrivener, and this is my first post here.
I can see the advantages of Markdown when it’s necessary to export to various formats, particularly .docx and .pdf. I don’t understand why Wordpress users feel a need for it.
