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Want to publish directly from Google Docs to your WordPress site? Setting-up Google Docs is a chore, but easy once you’ve done the hard work. Here’s how I did it.

Google Docs may not be the world’s best word processor, but you won’t find a better way of collaborating on documents. Sharing and collaboration works far better than with Microsoft Word.

Recently I used Google Docs to edit some shared documents which would eventually become WordPress posts.

After writing the first post, I cut and pasted the text into WordPress. It wasn’t pretty. Eventually I used WordPress’ paste as plain text function, but that loses formatting.

I decided to investigate posting directly from Google Docs to WordPress.

There are a number of guides explaining how to do this, but an online applications like Google Docs is a moving target – some of the steps explained in the guides have changed in recent updates.

Here’s what I did:

  1. Get WordPress ready to receive Google Docs. Go to the Dashboard, select Settings, then Writing.

  2. Select the box where it says:
    XML-RPC Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.

  3. In Google Docs, open the document you’d like to post in WordPress.

  4. Pull down the Share menu in the top right hand corner of the screen and select Publish as web page.

  5. You should see two items, the second says This document has not been published to your blog.

  6. If this is the first time you’ve tried posting to your WordPress site from Google Docs, there will be a message saying: You need to set your blog site settings before you can post documents to your blog.

  7. Click on the link.

  8. If you use a hosted WordPress.com blog, then click the first button (which is selected by default) and choose WordPress.com from the pull-down menu next to the word Provider. If you run a self-hosted WordPress site, you’ll need to select the My own server / custom option then choose Metaweblog API and your site address. It is important to end the xmlrpc.php – which is normally in the home directory.

  9. Add your user name and password.

The process isn’t foolproof – I still ended up needing to edit some HTML code which came through from Google Docs – but if you’ve build your workflow around Google’s tools, this is relatively straightforward.