Posting to WordPress blog using email
WordPress can be configured to use e-mail to post to a blog. This functionality can be implemented in three steps which would be discussed as follows.
Creating an email account is the first step. It’s better not to use public, free e-mail servers like Yahoo, Hotmail, etc., for this account. Instead, create a new e-mail account on your web host’s mail server or a separate e-mail server.
Second step is to configure the WordPress account to access your new email account. For this, go to the ‘Writing Options’ panel and fill in the name of the mail server and port number your web hosting provider uses. If your mail server requires an SSL (secure) connection, precede your mail server address with ssl://, e.g. ssl://pop.example.com. After that, enter the login name and password for your new e-mail account. Having done that, choose the default category that will be assigned to posts submitted via e-mail and click ‘Update Options’.
Now is the main task, that is, publishing the email posts. Manually, you can go to the following link http://example.com/installdir/wp-mail.php immediately after you send an e-mail to your new e-mail account. Alternatively, for automatic browser activation, you can add the following iframe code to the footer of your blog:
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<iframe src="http://yourblogdomain/wordpressinstalldir/wp-mail.php" name="mailiframe" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title=""></iframe> |
Edit the above line of code so that it refers to the location of your wp-mail.php file. Add this line of code to the footer.php file in the directory for whatever theme you are using.
Another valid alternative to calling the iframe on every page load is adding an action to your active theme’s functions.php file. This will check for mail every 15 minutes and does not add any HTML to your theme. The code to be added is as follows:
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add_action('shutdown', 'retrieve_post_via_mail'); function retrieve_post_via_mail() { flush(); // Display the page before the mail fetching begins if(get_transient('retrieve_post_via_mail')) { return; // The mail has been checked recently; don't check again } else { // The mail has not been checked in more than 15 minutes $mail = wp_remote_get(get_bloginfo('wpurl').'/wp-mail.php'); if(!is_wp_error($mail)) { // If retrieve succeeded set_transient('retrieve_post_via_mail', 1, 60 * 15); // check again in 15 minutes. } else { set_transient('retrieve_post_via_mail', 1, 60 * 5); // check again in 5 minutes; we don't want to overload the server } } } |
This method is good for users who would like to avoid using cron jobs, which are configured on the server. Unlike cron jobs, this process will only run when pages on the blog are loaded.
After implementing this functionality once, you would be able to post to your WordPress blog or website directly from your mail account.
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