Practical WordPress Tip #17: Use the tail of your Drafts queue for “notes”

October 21, 2009 By 5 Comments

(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

Benefit: Tactics for post management help produce daily or regular posting, which encourages frequent search engine indexing for your site.

Problem: By default, WordPress content is either a post or a page, which limits it’s functionality as a content management system (CMS).

Practical WordPress Tip: Posts which are important yet difficult to finish can be dated well in the past to remove them from the head of your Drafts queue.

Here’s how: Really easy, just change the date on these posts to move them from the front page of your Edit Posts page. A date before the oldest published post works well.

Why: Having a healthy drafts queue provides a lot of fodder for regular posting. But many drafts never really go anywhere, or require substantial effort to finish. You need to have these articles archived somewhere. The bottom of your Drafts queue is as good a place as any. For example, I’ve re-dated all Drafts in the C programming category at There Is NO Box to January 1, 2006. I’ll continue writing on C programming in the future, but not in the near future.

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Practical WordPress Tip #2: Make Your Draft Queue Work For You

August 5, 2009 By 3 Comments

(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

Benefit: Writing regularly reassures readers of your commitment and lures search engines into regularly indexing your content.

Problem: Having a lot of drafts in your “Edit Posts” can get really messy without having a good system for organizing drafts as you go.

Practical WordPress Tip: Keep your publication time for all of your drafts out in the future to cleanly separate drafts from published articles when viewing your combined article list.

Here’s how:

  1. Schedule ALL of your drafts for publishing in the future. If this is your first time scheduling, push them out a month or two at least.
  2. If desired, sort like articles into adjacent publication dates.
  3. When starting a new article, if you don’t finish it, move the modification date up 1 month. This is extremely easy to do.
  4. The following day, move every article with the current modification date up one month.
  5. Keep rolling articles ahead by month as you go. If you have them sorted, this will preserve the relative order of the dates.

The result is a clean separation by date between your draft articles and your published articles. No more paging back through screen and screen of articles figuring out which drafts need to be moved where.

Note: Using just the “Draft” view isn’t helpful when you need to keep track of what you have already published… and what’s coming up ahead. It’s extremely helpful to see everything in context.

Why: Once you make a commitment to writing regularly, the agony of finding something to write about becomes a distant memory. The new agony is finding time to write about everything you want to write about. WordPress can help out. The key is effective use of your Draft articles queue.

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Do you have a Tip? Would you like to write a Practical WordPress Tip? Each Tip is very short, and focuses on a single action that anyone can use right away, no programming required! If you have a Tip that fits into this series, and you’d like to publish it here on Website In A Weekend, send it on!

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: ,