WordPress.com and Google Docs have partnered up! You can now write your blog posts in Google Docs, add links and images, and then save the entire document (images and all) as a draft in WordPress. How cool is that!
Self-hosted sites get the feature too!
While WordPress.com is always working to add features to keep their hosted version of WordPress competitive, the self-hosted WordPress.org users have not been left out. The feature is available to self-hosted WordPress users through JetPack.
While JetPack didn’t have a great name a few years back because it was a little too heavy for some, it has stepped up it’s game over the last year or two. A lot of work has been done on JetPack and features that are turned off, are not loaded, making it a much lighter plugin. And, Automattic keeps adding great new features to JetPack (although the better options like VaultPress now require a paid subscription to use).
How do you get started?
- Go to the Google Docs Web Store
- Install the Addon – WordPress.com for Google Docs
Or
- From within Google Docs
- Open a new document
- Click on Add-ons -> Get add-ons -> Search for “Automattic”
- Follow the directions to connect to your WordPress.com account
For WordPress.org users with JetPack, follow the same procedure, but make sure you have the JSON API feature turned on within JetPack.
Once the add-on is installed, you will be able to create a new document and save it to your authorized blog as a draft post from the right sidebar.. If you have one blog that you post to this is a simple one-time authorization.
I have a number of both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (self-hosted) sites with JetPack. The add-on allows me to select from any of my .com or .org sites to save to. I did find you have to delete the last connection and reauthorize the add-on with each new doc if you want to select a different account to post to.
This is an awesome new feature! I love it! This not only allows you to edit your posts in Google Docs, but you will have a backup there as well. It doesn’t hurt that Google Docs comes with 15GB of free storage and and you can increase that to 100GB of storage for a mere 99 cents per month! And if you collaborate on a blog post, well, this would obviously be the way to go.
I’m pretty excited about this new feature! Give it a try! If you like Google Docs and you blog, this might just be your new blogging workflow.
Read WordPress.com founder Matt Mullenweg’s original post about this new feature on his blog at https://ma.tt/2017/03/wordpress-collaborative-editing/.
