You finish the article and hit Publish. Then the social posts get written in another tab, later in the day, or not at all. By then the link is somewhere in your clipboard history and the featured image is in a downloads folder.
The Orbitwrite plugin for WordPress moves that step into the editor. You write the post for each channel next to the article, choose when it goes out, and see how it did without leaving WordPress. This post walks through setting it up and the choices you get.
What you need
- An Orbitwrite workspace with at least one connected channel.
- A site on WordPress 6.6 or later and PHP 7.4 or later, served over HTTPS, with permalinks set to anything other than Plain. Orbitwrite connects to your site to finish signing you in, so it needs a public address. The plugin checks each of these on its Orbitwrite page and tells you which one to change.
The full list is in the WordPress docs.
Install the plugin and sign in
In WordPress, open Plugins, then Add New Plugin, and search for Orbitwrite. Install it and activate it. Then open Orbitwrite in the admin menu and choose Connect Orbitwrite.
You sign in on orbitwrite.com and approve the connection, and you're sent back to WordPress with your channels listed. There's no API key to copy. Everyone on your site connects their own Orbitwrite account, so a post goes out with that person's permissions and to their channels.
Write the post in the sidebar
Open an article in the block editor and click the share icon in the toolbar to open the Share on Orbitwrite sidebar. The post starts from the article's title and link, and the featured image is attached.
The Main post is the text and image every channel uses. Tick the channels you want to post to. If one of them needs different words, untick Same as main post under that channel and give it its own text or image. Each channel shows its character count as you type, and flags anything its network won't accept, such as an Instagram post with no image.
Images go to each network at the largest size it accepts, picked from the sizes WordPress already generated. If you close the sidebar or reload the page, the post you were writing is still there, and Start over from the article resets it.
Choose when it goes out
Under When there are three options:
- Next slot uses your workspace's posting schedule, so the post lands in the next free time you've already set up.
- Pick a time takes a date and a time.
- Now publishes straight away.
Times are in your workspace's timezone, and the sidebar names it. That's the same timezone your calendar uses, so a post scheduled from WordPress sits on the calendar next to everything else.
After you send it, the sidebar lists every post sent for that article with its status (scheduled, waiting for approval or published) and a link to each live post. Published posts show their impressions, reactions, comments, reposts and link clicks. A post that hasn't gone out yet can be deleted from there.
Let auto-share do it
If you'd rather not write a post for every article, turn on auto-share. Under Orbitwrite, then Auto-share, switch on Share my articles when they're published and choose:
- the channels each new article goes to
- the text, written once with template tags
- whether to attach the featured image (on by default)
- when to send it: the next free slot, or as soon as the article is published
- whether to share posts, pages or both
The template tags are {title}, {url}, {excerpt}, {author} and {hashtags}, which is the article's tags written as hashtags. A template could be as short as this:
New on the blog: {title} {url}
The preview fills the text in from your latest article, so you can check it before you save.
A few rules are worth knowing:
- An article is auto-shared once, the first time it's published. It's skipped if you already shared it from its sidebar.
- To leave one article out, turn auto-share off in that article's Share on Orbitwrite sidebar before you publish.
- Auto-share settings belong to each author. When an editor publishes someone else's article, it goes to the author's channels, with the author's settings.
See the results
Every article lists its posts and how they did, as above. The Orbitwrite page in the admin menu, and a widget on the WordPress dashboard, compare your last four weeks with the four before: posts published, impressions, engagements and link clicks, plus your top posts.
For the full picture, open analytics in Orbitwrite.
Approvals still apply
The plugin acts as you, with your role in the workspace. If your role needs approval to publish, a post from WordPress waits for a reviewer and the sidebar shows it as Waiting for approval. Nothing goes round the rules your team has set.
Who it suits
It suits a site where the person writing the article is also the person announcing it, or where each author has their own channels. It also helps if you want every article announced the same way without remembering to.
It's also worth knowing what it isn't. It doesn't create a post for you from nothing: you write the text, or you write a template. Auto-share only fires the first time an article is published, so editing an old article later won't send it again. And the plugin posts to the workspace you picked when you signed in, so if you work across several, check the name shown in the composer ("Posting to ...") before you send.
To try it, install Orbitwrite from the Plugins screen in WordPress, or read the plugin page first.