Introducing SteemPress beta, a wordpress plugin for steem

If you’ve been following @fredrikaa and I, you’ve probably seen that we are working on a wordpress plugin for steem. Well, it’s time for me to show you the code and share some more details.

The need for a wordpress plugin
First of all, why do we need this? Steemit.com is already providing a site for bloggers and adoption is growing fast. However, onboarding new users is still a main area where there is a room for improvement. Furthermore, onboarding writers who already have an audience will also help multiply our reach. People like @davidpakman is a great example, who has invited his audience and promoted steem outside of the platform through videos like this

Today, 29% of all of the web traffic goes to wordpress-powered websites. So if we want to reach a large number of people, wordpress is still the place to go.
So, what if you as a blog owner could automatically share your posts to the steem blockchain directly from wordpress to get all the added benefits that the blockchain has to offer? It would help you gain a new audience and by having your followers come to steem to upvote your posts it could also guarantee a second source of income.

Hence came

Steempress
Steempress is a wordpress plugin that will publish whatever you write on your blog directly to the steem blockchain. The best part is that Steempress will also automatically handle the the conversion from wordpress's html code into steemit's markdown! Meaning that you will not need to make the extra edits that would be necessary if you were to manually post both on steemit and on wordpress, the plugin got you covered! ;)

Obviously, Steempress is still in beta, and so the conversion is still being improved. Therefore, it can still be a little janky sometimes so you might have to delete one space here and there. This, however, is mostly very minimal stuff caused by some corner cases that we don’t handle, yet. This we will look to improve over time as we get more testers and more users!

Features
Custom Conversion from html to markdown to fit steemit's syntax
Automatic posting of your articles on steem whenever there is a new post
Self-vote when posting an article
Roadmap :
V1 :
50% sbd or 100% powerup
Tags that can be set for each post
Optional self vote
Perfect the conversion to handle a maximum number of corner cases.
V1.1 :
Filters to avoid posting some articles if they contain x keyword in the title
Post old articles
? Please tell us in the comments what you would like to see !
If you're curious you can download the source code

Technology Stack
Steempress is split in two parts :

Php
There is the php part, which is the plugin itself, it's where all of the configuration happens. We query the wordpress bindings to known when you publish an article, read them to get the text, title etc and then send it to the api.

Nodejs
The api is written in nodejs, it's what will receive the data from the plugin, convert the article to markdown and send it to the steem blockchain via https://github.com/steemit/steem-js

How to install it ?
@scottyeager made a great guide I suggest you head over there to check it out.

How to contribute?
If you have questions, feel free to hit us up : @howo or @fredrikaa on https://steemit.chat

We have a dire need for more testing and feedback, we've tested this with very few people and we'd love to hear what you think.

And if you publish an article and see some conversion errors, it would mean the world to us if you could send us the html of that article so we can improve thanks to it.

If you feel like working on your own directly, feel free, just submit a pull request and we'll go from there. There are no specific rules, try to follow the coding style and put comments on unclear functions but that's it.