Tag: Wordpress

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What is the time in WordPress? How to change the WordPress time-zone?

Thomas is writing lots of articles that he wants to have published at different times. But, when he sets an article to be published at 12.00, it is often published one hour later. How come? What time system does WordPress run with?

Thomas once tried to help someone to have an article published at exactly 00.00 on New Year’s Eve, wishing everyone a happy new year. But, it turned into a major bummer, because the article was published at 23.00 instead. What caused this? How can Thomas make sure it will not happen again?

Fix the time zone of your WordPress installation

Thomas has found a way to solve this problem once and for all. To do so, he goes to Settings and chooses General in the WordPress menu. Under General Settings he can find an option which is called “Time Zone.”

The WordPress time zone

Above you can see a picture showing what this is like. First, you can see that the time zone is set to UTC +0, and beneath you an see what this actually means when it comes to the time of the given WordPress installation.

If Thomas lives in a country which is UTC +1 and Thomas sets an article to be released at 12.00, it will be released at 13.00 in his local time, because WordPress will publish it at 12.00 UTC +0 time. The easiest way to fix the trouble is by changing the time zone so that it will reflect the time zone you are in!

Thomas is a bit confused, but at least he understands how it works. He will not fail again if he tries to publish something at exactly 00.00 on New Year’s Eve, that is for sure!

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How to schedule a WordPress post?

Have you written a WordPress post that you would like to publish another time and another date? Is there a way to publish a WordPress post at a special time?

Thomas likes to do a lot of work before he is going on holiday and before the weekends. Now he would like to write some blog posts that are to be published during the Christmas holiday, but he doesn’t want to actually work during the Christmas holiday. So, how can he schedule blog posts using WordPress to that it will publish the articles during the holiday?

Schedule posts with WordPress

Thomas was very happy to notice that publishing WordPress posts at a given time and a date was very easy, at least as he found out how and where to do so.

How is it done?

When Thomas has finished writing the actual article, he goes to the “Publish” box on the right side of the blog post itself. You can see it on the picture beneath.

publish wordpress

If you see the picture above, you can see the arrow pointing at the “publish” text. It is set to immediately at the moment, but if you press edit, you can easily set the time and date for the article to be published.

If you want to have the article published on December 24th at 18.00, it will look like this.

The post is set to be published on December 24th at 18.00
The post is set to be published on December 24th at 18.00

Now all Thomas has to do is to press the Schedule button (earlier Publish was written, but since the article is set to be published in the future, the text has now changed to schedule).

That is how easy it is to schedule an article for a future release in WordPress! And, since Thomas uses SteemPress to publish his article to Steemit, this will also help him out schedule articles for future release on Steemit!

 

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How to import a Drupal blog to WordPress?

Thomas is a gigantic WordPress fan. He would never use any other CMS-system, and he hasn’t even tried (and almost not even heard of) Drupal. But, one day he is offered a challenge. 

A friend of Thomas has been running a Drupal website for more than 10 years. The website consists of more than 1500 posts and articles, and now he wants to import all the content to his brand new WordPress site. Is that even possible? The thought of copying all those articles manually makes Thomas feel sick and depressed. There has got to be a way to do this job automatically, or maybe not?

Understanding Drupal is hard for Thomas

The first thing Thomas understands is that Drupal is quite different from WordPress when it comes to the structure of blog posts and content. He bumps into the word “nodes” lots of times, and he is quite confused. What can he do?

drupal to wordpress

Thomas finds a WordPress plugin

Thomas has been looking for a solution, and he has found a WordPress plugin named FG Drupal to WordPress. It looks very promising, and he quickly gives it a try. To make it word, he has to add the information about the SQL database of the Drupal website, and of course, the login credentials and name of the database. After that the job is easy, and the content is imported.

There are some options that needs to be set when it comes to importing media, featured images and so on, but Thomas tries a couple of times to make sure everything is imported the way he wants to.

Thomas isn’t completely satisfied

There is, however, a few problems. The free version of FG Drupal to WordPress doesn’t import categories, nor taxonomies (that is, tags). This is problematic, because those are a crucial part of the structure of the website. For that reason, Thomas decides to purchase the Premium version. He feels sorry about paying 50 Euro for a plugin that he will only use once, but it is worth it (after all, his friend is paying), and because it has to be there fore the website to work like it should.

After importing, Thomas has to install some extra plugins in order to see the imported Drupal content correctly. This is because of the strange structure of the Drupal databse and website, but after some hours, the job is done, and he is 99% satisfied with the job he has done.

Are you ready to import your Drupal website to WordPress?

Hopefully, the instructions and this tutorial from Thomas will help you migrate your Drupal website to WordPress. if you have any comments or maybe a question, use the comment field!

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How to include a Medium feed in your WordPress blog?

Thomas has published quite a lot of articles on Medium in the last weeks. Many of the articles are copies of the articles published on www.thethomastories.com, but some of them are original content, written for Medium only.

thethomasstories on medium

Thomas would like to give more attention to the Medium articles, and therefore he wants to add a “latest posts on Medium” widget on his WordPress blog. How can that be done? He has been looking for a good plugin, but he didn’t really find one that satisfied him. So, what can Thomas do to include the latest posts from his Medium blog in a widget on his website?

There are a couple of solutions that do the job, and here Thomas will list some of them.

How to show the latest Medium posts in a WordPress blog!

First of all, the most important thing is to know the address of your Medium feed. Your feed is not the same as your Medium profile, but it is somewhat different. The address to your Medium feed is:

www.medium.com/feed/@profilename

For Thomas, the link to his Medium feed is: http://www.medium.com/feed/@thethomasstorie

Now that Thomas knows the address of his Medium feed, he copies this link, or stores it in an easily accessible place.

Include the Medium feed in WordPress

The next thing Thomas does is to enter the Widget settings under Appearance in WordPress. There is a basic widget there named RSS. But, unfortunately, RSS did not work with the Medium feed, it only gave him an error message. It said: “feed could not be found at https://medium.com/feed/@thethomasstorie. A feed with an invalid mime type may fall victim to this error, or SimplePie was unable to auto-discover it. Use force_feed() if you are certain this URL is a real feed.”

Instead of trying to understand this, Thomas went on and tried another plugin. He downloaded Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite, and activated the plugin.

Once again he entered the widgets menu, and he added Feedzy RSS to his widget bar. He added the Medium feed address, set the number of posts to show, and set the image size to 40. He then pressed save, and then what happened? The latest three Medium posts could be seen in the widget area of his WordPress blog.

Visitors can now see a widget presenting the latest Medium posts on Thomas' WordPress blog
Visitors can now see a widget presenting the latest Medium posts on Thomas’ WordPress blog

Thomas has fixed yet another problem, and he is very happy about it. Hopefully, he has been able to help you as well.

Should you have further comments or questions, use the comment field.

Want to read more interesting articles from Thomas? Make sure to follow him on Steemit, on Facebook, on Medium, on Twitter, on YouTube, and do not forget to visit www.thethomasstories.com.

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How to publish old WordPress posts with SteemPress to Steemit?

Thomas has just installed Steem Press on his WordPress blog. From now on new posts will be published on Steemit automatically. But, is there a way to publish old posts as well?

Thomas is a happy and enthusiastic blogger. But, he loves spending his time wisely, and now he is looking for a way to publish his old WordPress posts to Steemit using SteemPress. It is great that the new posts will be published automatically after installing SteemPress, but what about the old posts?

Thomas has thought about the topic for a while, and he wonders if he should delete his old posts, copy the content, and then republish them all over again. In that way, the posts will be published to Steemit, and at the same time exist on the old blog like before. It could work, but it is not a very efficient method. Thomas isn’t happy with the solution.

Thomas gets ready to delete some old posts

While waiting for a better solution to show up, Thomas starts looking through some old posts. He wants to delete a couple of them, and that is when Thomas discovers an amazing little text.

Wow - I can publish to Steem from the post overview in WordPress!
Wow – I can publish to Steem from the post overview in WordPress!

While looking for something else, Thomas suddenly discovered the text “Publish to Steem” in the post overview. Here he can simply select old blog posts and press “Publish to Steem,” and the posts will be published automatically.

There is a maximum of one post per five minutes, so Thomas quickly discovers that it will take a while for all his posts to get published, but it is still a very efficient way to publish old WordPress posts to Steemit.

At first, the article doesn’t seem to get published. That is when Thomas realizes that he has set a delay for posts to be published on 2000 minutes in the SteemPress options. He decides to keep it this way, but at least he understands why the articles aren’t published on Steemit right away.

Thomas is very happy, and he looks forward to seeing his new and old blog posts on the Steemit platform.

Thomas on YouTube