Shawn Donley’s BLOG

http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/wordpress/wordpress-customization/

You don’t honestly think I have the time or ambition to create these great looking posts do you? Especially when I cannot even spare a few moments to get the stupid spell checker to work correctly in WordPress… anyways, this is very slick. The following explains the whole thing:

http://skattertech.com/2007/02/word-07-supports-wordpress/

WordPress has the ability to allow posting to a Blog via electronic mail.  This is a great time saver.  In fact, until I found this function, I was doing double the effort at work, since I would copy/paste an e-mail to my blog after I would send it out.  This way, all I have to do and cc: the e-mail account that I established and it is automatically posted to my blog.  I can then log in later and clean up the post (i.e. move it to a better category, or make simple changes)

The following explains the steps that I used to get this function to work. It works pretty good after all of the configuration and extra programming is completed. It took some time to find all of the pieces to put them together, but it was worth it in the end.

Step 1: Create a e-mail account

I created a separate, special e-mail account that I can use to send the e-mail posts.  This should be kept private so that you don’t get spam.  It has to be a server that has Pop3 mail capabilities.

Step 2: Configure WordPress

Log into the administrative section of your WordPress blog, and go to Options -> Writing.  Fill in the information under the Post via e-mail section.  This should match the criteria of the account that you created in Step 1.

Step 3: Setup the transfer to the blog

I was running this as a Cron Job every 5 minutes, but opted to turn that off since I don’t actually post that often.  I added the following line to the bottom of the footer within my template:

<iframe src=”http://www.shawndonley.com/wordpress/wp-mail.php” name=”mailiframe” width=”0″ height=”0″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” title=”"></iframe>

Now, everytime I go to my blog page (or anyone else does) the new posts are downloaded from the e-mail account and placed into an uncategorized category. 

Step 4: Fix the program PHP file

Once I got everything configured and somewhat working, I noticed that it was not working correctly.  The only thing that pulled over was the Title of the e-mail and not the content.  After looking around on the WordPress website, I found that there was a patch to make this work properly.  Long story short, the following is a fixed class-pop3.php file that needs to be placed into the

class-pop3.php fixed

The above file needs to be placed in the wp-includes subfolder of the WordPress installation directory.  This will fix the issue mentioned above.

More Information:  For detail instructions on the above, here is the link: http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_by_Email

As you can see, the default template for WordPress is not really that attractive. Wordpress does have the option built into it that will allow you to download predefined templates; however, I didn’t really care for either of them either. So, I hit the net. I found the following tutorial that was really helpful, and worth adding to my blog:

http://jonathanwold.com/tutorials/wordpress_theme/