About the ClassicPress blog and how you can help!
Creating articles for the ClassicPress blog
This is a somewhat more meta article about the making of articles for the ClassicPress blog. A lot happens behind the scenes when we bring you a new article. I’ve had lots of contact with people about almost everything we post here. Who am I? Well you know who I am as my name is in the author card of this article. But what I do might not be widely known.
I am Klein, editor of the ClassicPress Blog. I’ve worked at the blog under the supervision of marketing leads Ray Gulick and Michelle Coe for about 7 months and have really enjoyed doing so. I have worked with many amazing people in the community like John Alarcon and Alan Coggins to get an article out there each week. And I am also always looking for more people to work with!
The article making process
Most of the things I start writing never hit the blog. Not because they’re rejected, but because I throw them away as uninteresting or lacking. More easy are the collaborations with others. Often the tutorials we publish are republished from another blog. Here the only challenge is selecting things that are interesting and approaching the original writer about being featured.
A little more challenging but still relatively easy are the Meet the Community pieces were we approach a member of the community and do a feature on them. Most often it is the community member themselves who does most of the work in writing about themselves. As the editor we only spellcheck and provide follow-up questions to expand the feature where necessary.
When all text is written or put together, it is sent over to the marketing leads for a final review (Please don’t be too hard on this one 😉 ). If everything is okay we go into the publishing phase. Often we prepare an article at least a week before it goes live. In cases of republishing this is of course so that the original publisher gets all the initial traffic. But even in our own cases it’s good to have something ready so that we can take our time making corrections. Also we try to have something in the back so that if I miss a week for whatever reason, we don’t have an empty blog.
Then we finally hit the date of publishing, this goes pretty much automatically. There is a nifty system built into the site that automatically creates a topic on the forum for discussion of the article and like we all know, scheduling an article based on server time is really easy in ClassicPress. I personally always enjoy seeing a new article go up, and I do hope the community (that’s you) does as well.
Why are you writing this?
That is an interesting question, thank you for asking, me. The honest answer is that we could use some help. We want to make interesting content for everyone. With the tutorials and Meet the Community articles, I hope we’ve been doing that. But we could use some fresh insight. Do you have a tutorial you would love to share with the community? Interesting ClassicPress related news? An opinion piece you really want to share? or something else noteworthy? Please share it with me! You can reach me on the ClassicPress slack or through the forums.
About Patrick Klein
Front-end web developer and Google certified SEO and SEA professional from the Netherlands working for a company that has been around for over 50 years with a specialty in PR and advertisement. In recent years we have also been working on getting beautiful websites up and running that are affordable for smaller companies.
It’s interesting to learn more about the blogging process. It’s great to start seeing more and more contributors. I’d like to add – because a lot of people wonder, “What should I write about?” – if you have ever searched Google for an article or tutorial and you weren’t able to find anything that met your needs…or you had to rely on 12 tutorials because they all didn’t fully cover what you needed to know… that is what you should write about – write the very article you were looking for.