Automatic importing

Automatic importing uses a few tools to bring in posts from other stations’ web sites, complete with media and some metadata (for example, authors are sometimes automatically imported, and other metadata is in progress).

Click on “Distributor” in the left-hand menu (near the bottom) in WordPress

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Select the station from which you want to pull stories

Use the dropdown near the top of the page. There’s a limited list for now as we test – it will be expanded in the future.

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Optional: automatically import media

You can tell the system to try and pull in media with the post (when this works, it fully imports the media into the WordPress media library – no copy-pasting).

You can also skip this step for now and import remote media later while you’re editing the post.

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Import either one post or select several

To import one post: hover over the title of the post and click “Pull” from the menu that appears.

(“View” will take you to the original post on the other station’s site; “Skip” will remove the post from the list of ones you can pull in)

To import several posts: Check the checkboxes next to the posts you want and click “Apply” next to the dropdown in the upper left (make sure the dropdown is set to “Pull”).

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Find the posts in the “Pulled” section

You after importing posts (either one or several), you should be redirected to the Pulled posts section.

Find posts you want to edit/publish in that list, hover over the headline, and click the “Edit” link (which appears on hover).

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Edit the post as usual

If you didn’t check the box to import remote media on import, you can import remote media from the post edit screen.

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Check that remote media has been imported

Click on an image to select it and click the pencil icon from the popup

If the image is in the media library, there should be two buttons underneath the image in the details popup: Edit Original and Replace.

If those buttons are not there, the image is probably still remote and the import didn’t work. (Please let David know and manually import it as you normally would).

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Things to be aware of

• Some station sites might have some automated search-and-replace rules for content (e.g., for Alaska Public Media’s in-text related content links). These have all been tested, but you should still check the body of the post to make sure it matches the source.
• Authors should be assigned for some sites (at the time of this writing, only Alaska Public Media) if there’s an author on KTOO.org with an identical name (variations or abbreviations that are different between sites will throw it off).
• Please use these features with care. I’ve tested them as thoroughly as I can, but they’ll still need manual checking for a while to identify any situations where they don’t work as expected. Please email me a link to any articles that are having issues.