My Sunday afternoon was meant to be a time to relax, play with my son (who will soon be celebrating his first birthday), read the papers and watch a bit of telly. I didn’t intend to go online at any time.
But the urge crushed me.
And I am glad it did as I noticed a tweet from Copyblogger about a WordPress plugin called Editorial Calendar by Zack Grossbart.
I don’t know about you, but I like to keep myself very well organized. Especially when it comes to blogging and all that it entails – SEO, research, writing, testing, tweeting, bookmarking, submitting, registering etc. And a good way to stay organized when creating a posting schedule is to be able to see, at a glance, which posts will be published on any given date.
Enter the Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress
Once installed and activated you will see a new link to Calendar in the Posts menu:
Clicking on that link takes you to the calendar screen. There isn’t much in mine at the moment because I only installed the plugin yesterday (and I generally don’t schedule posts on this blog to publish in the future).
You can see from this screenshot that I have published a post today, and I have another (test) post scheduled for tomorrow. You can also see a link that says New Post. The link to New Post only appears when you move your mouse across the space at top of the box. The same goes for the links to edit/view/delete the post (the links only appear when you move your mouse over that area of the box):
One of the coolest things about this plugin is the drag and drop feature. Say I have a post scheduled for tomorrow, but I want to change my mind about the publication date. All I have to do is drag and drop the post title from the currently scheduled date and drop it into the box provided for the new date. Really easy.
Main features of Editorial Calendar
- See all of your posts and when they’ll be posted
- Drag and drop to change your post dates
- Quickedit post titles, contents, and times
- Publish posts or manage drafts
- Easily see the status of your posts
- Manage posts from multiple authors
Once again, a really simple plugin that adds loads of value to WordPress.
If this sounds like a plugin you could use, click the following link to get it from the WordPress site: Editorial Calendar, or search for Editorial Calendar from within the admin area of your blog and install it that way.
Thank you very much for the great write up of our calendar. We’re always happy to learn how people are using it and see it help other bloggers.
In addition to showing you the future the calendar can also show you the past. You can look over your blog and see how well you’ve done with your blogging goals.
We are actively working on the next version and would love any feedback you have.
Thanks,
Zack
Hi Zack,
Thanks for dropping by, leaving a comment and providing us with such a great plugin. It is a neat way to quickly visualize how regular (or irregular) someone has been posting and to plan a posting schedule.
With regards to feedback and suggestions for future versions. I do have something to suggest – 1) The ability to view posts for a specific date range, similar to Google Analytics where the user can enter a start and end date, 2) The ability to change the default number of days visible on the screen, 3) A summary section which displays the number of posts made during a specific timeframe – week, month or year.
I am not sure how easy these would be to implement, but I think it is worth making the suggestions.
Thanks again for dropping by and best of luck with the plugin.
Stephen
Thanks for the feedback Stephen. You can change the number of weeks you’re seeing in the calendar in the screen options tab on the upper right. You can see up to five weeks in the calendar at one time.
We’ll consider the summary section for the next release. What would you want to see there? Just the number of posts, or something else?
Thanks,
Zack
Oh yes. I didn’t see that. Thanks.
For the summary I was thinking of a quick way to see the number of posts published each month for comparison purposes. I wouldn’t over-complicate it, just a simple vertical table broken down by month with a total for the year at the bottom:
Jan – 32
Feb – 21
etc
Total 53
I think that would be useful from a motivational point of view.
Stephen
I absolutely love this plug in with one exception. I run a multi-author blog and when I choose ‘quick edit’ on a post with the ‘pending review’ status, the pop up menu is not selectable.
Thanks for your help,
Hello Sophia,
Thank you for trying the plugin. The calendar knows how to handle draft, scheduled, and pending review posts. If you quick edit one of those posts you can change the post status in the quick edit view. I have added a pending review post to the demo calendar:
Zack’s WordPress Sandbox
It is scheduled for September 17th named Zack’s Pending Review Post.
There are some plugins that add custom post types in WordPress. When you create custom post types we show the status, but don’t know how to edit them in the quick edit panel.
Does that sound right to you?
Thanks,
Zack
Hi Zack,
Thanks for responding to this comment. Sophia didn’t subscribe to the comment thread, but I have sent an email to say you have responded. Not sure if she has been back to read your reply. Just FYI.
Thanks again.
What an interesting tool. Looks impressive. Not much more i can say, except i like :)
Are you going to install it and try it out? Let me know what you think if you do.