WordPress Q & A: Week of September 27

Ricky asks:

Thanks for your time. I’m working on a site where I’d like members to be able to submit posts, but I’d like to be able to moderate them first before they go live.

Kinda similar to what WP can do for comments, I’d like to do for posts. Is that possible?

Certainly! What you want is to open up registration and make the default role for new users “Contributor” instead of “Subscriber.” Contributors can submit posts for review, but not publish them. They’ll show up as “pending review” in the backend, and will require an Editor or Administrator to publish them. There are even plugins available to facilitate posting from the front end, such as Gravity Forms ($39 and up, GPL).

Allan asks:

I have hit an incredibly frustrating hitch with WP, and that is getting a text file with the content of my posts. I need a single file I can load into page layout software. I know about Blog Booker and Blurb but would like more layout control than those services offer.

If you need this for a bunch of posts on an ongoing basis, I’d create a custom page template and just have it do query_posts('posts_per_page=9999'); (or however many posts you want), and then do a basic loop. Look at a simple theme for inspiration on the template tags… it all depends on how you need it formatted.