WP-O-Matic 1.0 released at bavatuesdays

a "b" blog

Many bloggers have experimented with autoposting, Wp Robot is one of the best autoblogging solutions available....easy to use and keeps your blogs fresh!

Wordpress Info found on bavatuesdays.com

WP-O-Matic 1.0 has been released today and what a fine day it is for the aggregated auto-blogging world! You can download it here. Guilliermo Rauch, the 16 year-old wunderkind from Argentina, has delivered an unbelievable tool for WordPress and (YES it works!) WPMu.

In short, what is WP-o-Matic? It is a plugin that allows you to publish a variety of content from other blogs into one blog. This is a tool often used to aggregate content into one blog space, some folks have a problem with it because it can be used to "steal" other people's content and pass it off as your own, on the other hand when you are creating a distributed online learning environment like we are at UMW, it comes in extremely handy for aggregating all the different student blog feeds for a class, project, seminar, etc. into one space. Couple that with WPMu and you have a combination of tools wherein you can quickly and easily create multiple blog spaces and feed content in and out 'til your heart's content. Groovy!

You can get all the wonderful details from Guillermo's site, but there are a couple of things I want to highlight about this plugin that make it yet another important piece of the puzzle for UMW Blogs. First and foremost, WordPress-O-Matic is more akin to a fully-featured extension of Wordpress rather than "just a plugin". This is not like WP-Autoblog, which is just a simple space for copying and pasting feeds. (Although, it should be noted that WP-Autoblog can pull in the original post categories, something that WP-O-Matic does not do-a significant difference to note given that WP-Autoblog category feature makes sitewide tags for WPMu possible.) Additionally, it uses the SimplePie feed parser which is downright awesome -making all sorts of feeds from all sorts of places ripe for the picking.

The new version is organized around the logic of campaigns. What's a campaign? A campaign is, quite simply, a specific group of feeds. For our purposes a campaign could be just as easily thought of as a class. What is slick about this is that you can bundle a group of feeds for a class into a campaign then manage and customize that group of feeds accordingly. Also, they are all located in their distinct spaces making organization a cinch-something BDP RSS doesn't do so well (then again there are a number of things BDP RSS does that WP-O-Matic doesn't). The customizations options for each campaign are very, very sick! Here's a few:

The Custom Post Template deserves a little attention. This is a wild feature that allows you to decide where to put the content of the post you're pulling in, including the original post title, a link to the original post, a feedurl for the site your quoting, etc. What you have here is a way to customize the posts for any specific campaign (course). And customizing the links back to the original is extremely important so that an Autoblog can make sense to the potentially confused reader. This feature is really impressive, the only thing it is missing is a tag for the original author's name -you find a way to add that and you are set (let me know if you make any headway ).

The Use feed date option allows you to specify the time and date the original post was published rather than the time it was published via WP-O-Matic. Nice detail.

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