Good first effort but will probably not use it for now

  • I’ve not tested this extensively but have published two articles and they went well. There are a few issues that mean I get better results using the Medium “Import Story” feature. But it’s a really good first effort and I can see me coming back to this when a few kinks have been ironed out.

    Issues:
    – It does not seem to parse the caption short codes and published them as text on the Medium article, i.e., it displays
    [caption id=”attachment_5647" align=”alignnone” width=”1024"]
    image
    image caption[/caption]

    It’s not difficult to edit in Medium but the Import Story feature doesn’t have this issue (as it parsing the generated HTML not the WP short codes I assume)

    – There does not seem to be an option to not include an “Also published on Medium.” link on the WordPress article.

    There is an option to select “cross-link post” yes/no, but this only affects whether there is a link back to your WP post on the Medium article. I’d really like to choose at both ends, i.e., link from “WP to Medium only”, “Medium to WP only”, “Both”, “Neither”.

    The hint text implies it’s “both” or “neither” so this may be a bug as it is actually working as “WP to Medium” or “Both”

    “Whether or not to cross-link posts between this blog and Medium. When enabled adds a link to the bottom of both your local post, and the Medium post. Can be changed for each post.”

    I understand the desire to promote Medium but I’d prefer to choose as this might make it look like Medium is the master article to Google and so on.

    – This is a feature request not a bug: it would be nice if it took the feature image and used it as a header image in Medium (or gave that as an option). My WP theme does that so it means I have to manually add it in Medium whereas an import into Medium would take it. It probably need to be optional as some themes don’t do that.

    But in my case it means “Import Story” will pull the image but the plugin is not pushing it.

    So in summary, a great effort but not quite there yet.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Contributor majelbstoat

    (@majelbstoat)

    Hey, thanks very much for the feedback. The import on site, and import through API are somewhat different – the import on site parses the entire HTML at the URL as rendered by WordPress, whereas as the plugin just acts on post content. This leads to the differences you’re seeing.

    Shortlink parsing is a bug. I’ll probably have to adjust the priority of the filter to make sure they’re included. (Though, I’m currently a bit confused why they’re not. Anyway, can be fixed, and thanks for the open issue on Github.)

    Cross-link is intended to be “both” or “neither”. It being set to link to Medium but not the reverse is unintended, and a bug (which I can’t currently repro, but will keep trying). We set rel canonical back to your blog regardless of cross-linking, so Google will always know your site is the master.

    It might be sufficiently complex to handle all the possible cases for all the possible themes that feature image insertion isn’t a good tradeoff, but I’ll do some research here too.

    If you find anything else, please continue to raise them here: https://github.com/Medium/medium-wordpress-plugin/issues

    Cheers,

    Jamie.

    Hi Jamie,

    How can we remove the ‘also published on medium’ from WP until the option is available?

    Thread Starter hughforsyth

    (@hughforsyth)

    Hi Jamie,

    Thanks for responding.

    I suspect the short code thing will open another can of worms as there will stuff like HTML forms, calendars, light box image galleries, accordions, pop ups and so on that people use that you might need to sanitise (if the Medium API does not do that).

    I temporarily reactivated the plugin and tried to reproduce the crosslink issue and did. Perhaps it doesn’t do it on newly published articles?

    Opened an older article.
    Select “Cross Post: Public”
    Cross link posts: defaults to “No”
    Update WordPress post.

    WP article displays “Also published on Medium.”, Medium article has no crosslink.

    Thanks again.

    edit: I forgot to add that yes you are correct about the canonical tag back to the WP article in articles created by the plugin. This doesn’t happen in the importer which uses he Medium article for the canonical link, so that’s a +1 for the plugin vs the importer.

    Plugin Contributor majelbstoat

    (@majelbstoat)

    Hey wrgmag,

    In the meantime, if you’d like to disable the also published on Medium link, you can comment out the call to the “the_content” filter on line 19 of lib/medium-site.php.

    Jamie.

    Thanks for creating this plugin and making it available.

    I pushed my first story to Medium using this on my own blog.

    One question. Can you add, or tell me where so I can, the following attributes to the ‘Also published on Medium.’ link:

    • class="u-syndication"
    • rel="syndication"

    This would help with webmentions etc. See https://indiewebcamp.com/rel-syndication and POSSE.

    Thanks.

    Dave

    Hey there! Thanks for making this! Is there any plan to support other WordPress post types? We have posts that mimic the default news posts but are set up as separate and the Medium card does not show on these posts. Thanks!

    francisperron

    (@francisperron)

    Is this ok for SEO? Does it make duplicate content and does Google penalize it?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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