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:
- Get WordPress ready to receive Google Docs. Go to the Dashboard, select Settings, then Writing.
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Select the box where it says:
XML-RPC Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols. -
In Google Docs, open the document you’d like to post in WordPress.
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Pull down the Share menu in the top right hand corner of the screen and select Publish as web page.
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You should see two items, the second says This document has not been published to your blog.
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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.
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Click on the link.
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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.
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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.
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This doesn’t work in the newest version of Google Docs BUT never fear! Check out http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/docs-to-wordpress/, though it currently only works on .org sites.
Nice article! However, I don’t like Google Docs anymore. Basically because of its recent policy changes – I am concerned about the security of my data!
I wrote a short article on Office alternatives if you are interested in that:
http://scientificocean.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/how-to-turn-your-back-on-microsoft-office/