Introducing SteemPress beta, a wordpress plugin for steem

in #utopian-io6 years ago (edited)

Steem.png

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 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.



Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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Fantastic work! I had created the SteemPress repository a few months back via Utopian but I never found any developers for it. Good to see you took over the job.

I think the most important feature for this plugin is the total takeover of wordpress and making it into a proper Steem website. So just posting to the blockchain is by far not enough. It should replace the comment section entirely and include SteemConnect and upvoting directly on the page. If you can pull this off than you have developed one of the most impactful tools for Steem!

Keep up the good work!

Wait so you're the one behind steempress.com ? if so dm me we are looking to buy the domain :D Also I agree with you, and it's in the works to have steem totally integrated with the WordPress websites like you said.

Thanks for the kind words :)

No, I had no clue about the URL. I just coined the term and created a task request on Utopian for my idea which was never followed through. That’s all. All credit goes to you guys.

I'm the founder of https://SteemThat.com and will be testing this plugin very soon. The only thing we are really missing is upvoting and commenting and resteeming... Looking forward to testing this out. I was watching the Original SteemPress and nada. No one has wanted to tackle a full integration on this level yet.

We allow members to publish On SteemThat and use a separate script to publish to Steemit. I'm interested in allowing our community to stay on our website and interact with the blockchain. Would love to speak with you about this more @howo. We currently feed data to SteemThat.com and would also like to modify this some.

Oh by the way, we do have a few founders spots open if interested after you visit.

Takeover Wordpress? Steemit does not have the scope or even the purpose of Wordpress websites. In a Wordpress website I decide the theme, the menus, the purpose. Wordpress is not just a blog. That is a minimal use of Wordpress. Wordpress has many functions. BTW, what is a proper Steem site? Could you provide a link to a "Steem site"? If there is such a thing as creating a Steem website, I would be interested. Being on a blockchain, I would not have to use a host for my website with it's online store, blog, sections for my book (pages that are not "lost" after a certain date), event calendar, registration, connections to PayPal and credit cards and cryptocurrency payment. Steem does all this?

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Cheetah bot will punish it. You have to do it other way. Steemit to Wordpress !

Doing steemit to WordPress does not solve the problems we want to address and does little to onboard new users.
If a significant amount of original authors start to use the tool then it will be cheetah that has to adapt, not SteemPress. How they do it is up to them, but I can imagine a whitelist people can get on whereby proving that they own both the steem account and the blog website, cheetah will ignore the domain of their blog when searching for duplicates.

A somewhat simple solution to that would be some tag in permalink when posting through steempress that would identify such an article and skip cheetah and steemcleaners check.

Sadly this wouldn't work because nothing prevents a spammer from manually adding whatever steempress adds. The effort has to come from cheetah.

like a tag to your username on steemit

That is what we had with @recrypto's plugin. We entered the permalink as part of filling out what tags we wanted to use and other information that was relevant to Steemit.

ha ha ha funny comments sir...

haha
nice reply
worth it
upvoted
:)

nice comment sir.. this could be great solution for next. keep good working sir :)

You want Steemit to adapt...? Yea good luck with that buddy. Great idea, but pretty much a dream plug-in in terms of having the 'BlockChain' it runs on, adapt to 'it'.

that would be the best solution

I would still like to embed my steemit newsfeed to my website on wordpress. It will give a visibility of steemit outside of it.

@fredrikaa that could work

Hello, I am new blueskymaster, I like your work, give you a lot of praise

We must return to the vision and mission of the steemit community, the quantity must indeed increase but the quality must be the focus too. How to build the quality in steemit community development, we need to build and organize the infrastructure network of every community that spread all over the world. Fostering the spirit of the struggle is so important that people volunteer on the basis of the development of regional, local and group communities.Of course we really understand the word of "appreciated and award" of the practice of the word should be more effective, some time ago an award has be difficult to share, especially the award on comment category (probably because the price sbd and steem start expensive) so there is a hard counted. Then how about a good comment then dried up with an empty award. WordPress is indeed a community crater, it's not wrong. But many communities that have been woken up then cold down and generally is beginners.

good aspect sir

Cheetah and other initiatives like steemcleaner might definitely be a problem, but I confident that if you go to them first and be like "hey don't flag me I'm just duplicating my own content" it'll be fine. :)

What about an option to post on WP blog 7 or 8 days after it is published to Steemit?

but there is a problem some spammers are flagging our posts because we are promoting our websites in our posts and these persons are continuesly flaging our post because they told this is spam but i give the proof about ownership of website to steem but steemit team not helping us check my blogg @themarkymark is the main person who are flaging all those peolpe who are ading there websites link in his post please help us about this pbm

and is there any charges for ur plugin

cheater will do same

No because they can't prove ownership of the content they steal.

we are happy to now about this plugin because this is helpfull for us but if u did't do any thing about these peoples otherwise ur plugin is floop

And how does one notify Cheetah and prove ownership of the content?

Perhaps it helps to add our Steemit names on each of our Wordpress blogs and to add a Link of the Wordpress article on the Steemit article. I tried this twice and had no reactions of cheetah any more. In both cases I improved an old narration which I had written under another name before. A fellow Steemian told me it might be safer to quote the with text with the symbol >

I'm confused here. I know lots of people who do as I do and copy and paste our articles from our website blogs into Steemit. I've never been flagged. Why would I? It is my own original work. My url is also my steemit username. Maybe that is why I am not flagged....

Yes @mmmmkkkk311 I would like to feed that way as well (Steemit to Wordpress). Will this ever be possible?

seriously

For me it should be a two way conversion. Users of WP can automatically convert to Steempress andSteem users can convert or link to wordpress will be the best way for both world.

Wow, that's great news! A lot of value for me as a technical analyst blogger!

Here's a little what I do, hope I can give you some insight:

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@benkalashnikov/stellar-lumens-xlm-analysis-80-potential-profit

Screen Shot 2018-01-23 at 00.14.54.png

Great Update For Wordpress Users

I can't see the necessity of embeding an orthodox content manager with a totally new concept like steemit.
Steem has made its own way to merge content with blockchain idea. Let's stay innovative

Being leader is good and being the innovator is best thing. This plugin will persuade those already established influencers to have one more channel and steemit community benefit from onboarding new people.

Well, to be honest I actually think that even with Cheetah bot on the board right now, we can assure that everyone can post on the wordpress as on steemit in the same time which looks like a great opportunity here!
Im 100% sure that we will find out tons of people using this tool, however all is needed is to "avoid" cheetah somehow :) Obviously we need to wait for some time to see things going on like that, however I truly believe that we will see this plugin working totally well as soon as possible! Cheers :)

It makes more sense to distribute content from wordpress to all social media channels, SEO 101 builds links centralized to your site which can build traffic due to backlinks.

but will it bitconnect ???

If you publish to your blog and Steemit at the same time, then Cheetah can't use the search engine to determine if you used your blog as the source, because it won't be there yet.

However, Cheetah has said there is a way to keep him from tagging your own blog.

Hi deanlogic, what is the way?

I've never looked into it, because Cheetah doesn't harass me much anymore.

What a great Plugin, willing to try this on my blog...

I just tried it, let me know if you can get it working, nothing has shown up just yet...

yes really its amazing feature cheetah is angry with this.

Similar to cheetah the google robot will also punish duplicate/plagiarized content. So google will decide which website is more likely the original author. One way to do it is what content they discovered first.

So in order not to loose your owns blog organic traffic (steemit will be visited more frequently by google robots as most Wordpress blogs) I suggest a setting where users can set a delay time. Let’s say after publishing on the blog the plugin will post to steemit 12 hours later. Should be easy to implement.

This is from a SEO (search engine optimization) point of view quite relevant. Let me know if you need help or need more information on this issue.

Nonsense. There are a standard Wordpress plugins for Google, Instagram, etc. that have been around for years, just like for Joomla (which is what my website was for years until I switched to Wordpress). Google knows what they are. It is in their reference material for how to set it up so that Google knows it is really you. In fact, Instagram surprised me this last time by not posting my article until I went in Instagram and was asked was that me. I clicked on the button that said Yes, that was me. Then I had to go into Wordpress again and post for Instagram again and it worked. This is not all new stuff. I've been posting from my Website blog to social media for the past 7 years.

Awesome work. Integrating into WP is so important. One more step into become mainstream go to platform.

I think we're building something really great here! Can't wait to start bringing our new tool in front of as many bloggers and wordpress users as possible! :)

Dude This is what @fyrstikken requested 2 years ago according to steemit.com Thank you so much man!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@fyrstikken/write-a-steemit-plugin-for-wordpress-get-rich-work-fast-huge-demand

and now the REST of this message is NOT directed at you Fredrikaa, its just to Steemit Inc or Stinc as we call them on http://steemspeak.com the LARGEST steemit Chatroom(with VoiceChat) in the WORLD

Dear steemit inc,
You have a website that shows steemit posts with dates that say "2 years ago" when the website itself isnt even 2 years old! WTF show the actual DATE on the post!
WOW @ned should see how steemit posts now show up as Older than Steemit itself! maybe Fyrstikken really IS a time traveler to have a steemit post from 2 years ago when Steemit itself is less than 2 yers old still! :D And This has said 2 years old now for a few days so it must be OVER 2 years old by now if it was already 2 years old a few days or weeks ago actually, I had notcied this bug months ago honestly. ANYWAY we need to show the actual DATESof the articles and not some "1 year ago , 2 year ago., 8 months ago" nonesense, lol it needs to give us a dte, nowhere on here does it even show us thje date, so i guess we have to use busy.org or steemdb just to find WHEN an article was posted? Thats very bad very very bad, no wonder people would rather just use Wordpress now and post to steem with a plugin :D Hey just kidding but seriously it sucks that we have to contemplate making a new front end, we dont want to have to, but maybe we do... its just that s steemit.com look i wish they would just tell us when the hardfork is coming... whats up? whats going on? Whats the time frame on smart media tokens?!?!! Whats going on?? DO we even get communities anymore?? What about the December 2017 iOS Steemit App that @sneak showed everyone at the Steem Presentation in real life somewhere? What hapened to all the news?!?! Is anything still happening?!?! We are sitting here pulling our hair out wondering when we can sign new users up and we want POW account creation like teamspeak had and we want to have you guys fix steemit! COme on lets hardfoirk or find out whats going on with the hardfork! You guys realize we have to all vote on it as witnesses and we have a lot of steempower now and we want just some basic answers about the roadmap and we dont CARE if it takes all year to release the hardfork, but we WANNA know whats going on! we were promised something consistent with previous hardforks,ad now its Januray and siull nothing>? this is getting VERY close tothe VERY last minute and we want something and We want


Here is a map of the human brain that can help show us how that outer edges are the highly complex CPU type areas, that middle part is like another pattern of neurons like hippo campus its the Memory like RAM part, or maybe something else i dunno the computer analogy is strange here, but yeah u cn see the outter edges are where the good high complexity stuff us, wow its very very clear from this image and look at these human brain cells that look like organic circuit boards

Com hangout on http://steemspeak.com the LARGEST steemit Chatroom in the WORLD with @gyzimo powered @curioity bots that can send youmoney from discord account to discord account uysing steem and golos sbd and GBG, and soon other altcoins, AND we have @banjo and other @inertia bots that allow you to find prices of coins, Wolfram alpha data, accounts data, inflation data, all sorts of cool stuff you can do on Steemspeak.com discord chat 24/7 Steema nd Golos Graphene Voice and Text chat!

Sure, what do you want to talk about?

I don't really care either.

Guys, I love this as I'm a big time Wordpress lover. I develop websites all the time and it's my primary platform of choice. My customers love it too. #Winning The Steemit community definitely needs this plugin. 100%

Thanks a lot ! :D

Looks great. How do I get that plugin? Thanks Guy

Thanks!
@scottyeager already made a short guide on how to get started which you can read here. Hope you will find the tool useful and looking forward to hearing what you think about it :)

Wow, looks very nice :-) ... This is how it works. Thank you!

I am followed you !!

Hopefully its greater than bitconnect was. FML

its good for me. i have installed and testing on my blog. still feel something missing.

I am followed you

Hello followed you ! I'm howo :D

This is so exciting to hear about. I've been creating Wordpress sites for 9 years. I'd love to be a beta tester. I'm brand spanking new here but I've been copy & pasting posts from my blog and @cheetah has been killing me even when I post a link.

You said it! Very exciting times. Will follow.

It's a fantastic idea @fredrikaa can't wait to see it in action! Good luck with the process!

Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.

It's really cool what these guys are doing. My fear though is cheetar. Won't it always point the post as to being a copied content?

Cheetah and other initiatives like steemcleaner might definitely be a problem, but I confident that if you go to them first and be like "hey don't flag me I'm just duplicating my own content" it'll be fine.

Hello :) Fantastic Work !! Hope you have a lovely week ahead!! I am followed you! :)

That seems like a legit starting point.

Cheetah will probably tolerate it if both posts cross reference each other. For example, in Steemit: "A version of this post has also been published on my [blog](insert link)" and in your WP blog: "This post has also been published in [Steemit](insert link)"

You would think so. We'll find out.

Ideally, it could have the option to post to Steemit 7 days before it posts on the blog. I'd LOVE LOVE that feature. That's exactly what I'm already doing, but am doing it by hand.

good idea

More like linking it as a canonical URL?

@acdevan, saw you posted this 5months ago, were you able to make any experiences on this already?

Can it work the other way around? Publishing post on steemit automatically transfers the post to wordpress blog?

Not yet, but we are thinking of making a complete steem integration onto wordpress.

Cool :) blogging portal with automated steem cross-posting both ways would be awesome :)

Your welcome :)

Yes, I would like to know that too. Being a non-computer user, most of what was said above sounded like I should understand it, but I'm pretty sure I don't. When I think I know what wordpress is, and then try to explain, I don't know. I don't consider myself that dumb, but for thirty years I always had a junior or secretary to do this computer stuff, and I can barely use my Android phone, ai ¿
This us why I'm going on in many comments about indexing. With indexing, anyone at any level of tech, might find or research out, of present tags, or archives, just the post that gels with their level of understanding.
Keep on keeping on. 😇

The whole process is unnecessarily complicated, very soon the plugin will be on the wordpress plugin store and it'll be super easy to get it :)

If this kind of platform developed it would be great help for housewives.

This is a big win for Steemit! These new tools will grow the user population exponentially!

And the more users the more potential tools ;)

I’ve been using WordPress for a while now. This is going to be huge!

Great work

This is great, I think this can literally begin a new chapter in steemit adoption!

Very interesting, I'm going to have to test it out!

Thanks, please keep us updated on your findings :)

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