My blog has a narrow audience and I’d like to allow registered members to subscribe to a feed if they want to be advised of changes to categories. Can someone point me to a howto about what I need to do to syndicate my site? Thre’s too much detailed info on this site and no higher-level info – for example, don’t tell me what code to put into a page until we’ve established what it is that we want to do in a more general sense. I don’t know if I need to understand the nuances of v1.1 v2.0 or whatever. I don’t want Google to pick up on it (at least not just yet) primarily because I want to avoid spam. I just want to point my members to that feed so that they can get notification, and when I have this down I can open up a little more.

I know I can use a plugin to send e-mail for this too but I’d like to learn about how RSS works with WP. The cat2email plugin is a little trigger happy, sending a notice on every update and I have no control over when it sends. I want to send notification for a new posting only when I want – not automatically. I don’t want notifications to go out on update, only new posts. Subscribers can decide for themselves if they want to be notified of updates.

Pointing me to some higher level docs to RTFM is fine (I can easily Google for RSS myself) but I’d like to focus on how this works with WP to start.

Thanks!

So, if I have stacked up a set of posts for the next 11 days, and they have timestamps which make them visible each night, never-the-less, the cat2email sends out the freaking email IMMEDIATELY as the post is saved. This is “bad.”

So, the “edit the timestamp” isn’t going to do what I need.

The apparently logical thing to do is to use wp-cron to move them from draft to published status on-or-about the time I am looking to have them published, and “bingo” the silly thing should both appear in the blog AND be emailed out by cat2email. (I had foolishly hoped that private_to_public was an action hook that triggered when a post’s timestamp passed, but no. Having one of those would be cool.)

The thing is, I can’t figure out what call to make to publish those posts which are drafts, who’s timestamp is before “now.”

Any wizards out there?

-_ Rick

It worked fine, except we frequently set posts for release on a future date, stacking them up. Cat2email used the publish_post hook, I modified ONE LINE changing that to the private_to_published hook.

Now when the publication time comes, the post appears, but cat2email doesn’t trigger.

Is there a DIFFERENT add_action I should have used?

-_Rick

Has anyone used this successfully? What am I doing wrong?

The Cat2email allows a blogger to subscribe people via specific categories. FOr this reason, I think it’s very useful. If I understand the way this plugin works, the blogger subscribes someone to whichever category the latter’s interested in. But wouldn’t it be more effective (since no visitors have ever told me they want to subscribe to a specific category)to allow the would-be subscriber to choose the categories themselves (if any) when they subscribe to the blog?

I was wondering if there might be a way to combine the 2 features so that when a visitor clicks on the “Subscribe to ‘Blogname x'” link the next pg. they see would not only allow them to notified when there’s a new post published; it would alternatively allow them to subscribe to a specific category feed.

Does anyone know if this option exists or whether there might be a way to implement it? Might there be a way to tweal Subscribe 2 so it would incorporate Cat2email within it?