Introducing Slugger
Nothing makes us more happy than to solve issues that really get under our skin. We here at ChanceCube love to use external applications to manage our blogs. We’re a MarsEdit group, we admit it proudly.
One of the caveats to using MarsEdit to post to our site, was that the API that MarsEdit used to communicate with WordPress would not allow us to edit our post name (or slug) form MarsEdit. We always had to log into WordPress and change it manually or write the entire article from within the WordPress interface. This added many unneeded steps to our publishing.
We’ve now solved this issue with Slugger, a WordPress plugin that allows you to put your desired post name inside of your post content. Slugger looks for a specific tag within your post content, and uses that as the post name for that post. You can watch the demo movie to see exactly what I am talking about, or head on over to the Slugger page and download a copy for yourself.
Ok guys, that is very very useful. Thumbs up!
October 31st, 2006
josue: Thanks. I’ve been dying to have something like it for far too long - so I’m really happy we were able to get it done and released.
October 31st, 2006
Sounds great, although I don’t use MarsEdit
I was wondering though, could Slugger be extended to support other blogging tools? I’ve been thinking of creating something like this to make the Writely/Google Docs -> Wordpress publication process easier. Right now it doesn’t support Tags, and as it doesn’t support posting as a draft either it makes life a bit tricky.
November 1st, 2006
Dan: I didn’t realize there was a way to go from Writely/Google Docs to WordPress but I’m assuming that it still uses the same XML RPC (though there are a few APIs within that like the Blogger, WordPress, and MetaWeblog APIs), which would mean that Slugger will work for your situation out-of-the-box.
Give it a try, let us know.
November 1st, 2006
This is, without a doubt, the “missing link” between external editors and WordPress. Thanks for putting together such a clever plugin!
November 1st, 2006
Scott Johnson: And thanks for the accolades! I needed this plugin more than anyone I knew, so it was a real pleasure to get it out in the open.
November 1st, 2006
Thanks, Colin, for posting on my blog. You misunderstood me slightly, though: I want the “[slug][/slug]” removed entirely from the post after the slug itself is created. That way, should I ever disable Slugger, my posts won’t suddenly begin showing the “slug” tags.
November 2nd, 2006
Erik: I see your point. Perhaps I will build something along those lines at some point. However, be sure to review the added benefits of Slugger - even if you don’t want to use it going forward, you can keep it running for old posts with no drawbacks.
November 2nd, 2006