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Rayan Nait Mazi
Rayan Nait Mazi

Posted on

Difficulties with the RSS import tool

Hello everyone,

I've been trying to help people crosspost to the Development Hackers forem because it really is a win-win.

Everyone is always interested at first but they rarely get to it. I tried talking about the RSS import tool (which makes the process 99% easier) and they get very excited, but still don't do it.

I think it sounds a bit intimidating. A lot of the content creators I talk to don't really know what's an RSS feed or where to find it.

So I'm writing a custom page on why and how to crosspost, and how to leverage the RSS import tool. I hope that will make the process easier. You can of course copy the content of my page or give me feedback haha (it's still a work in progress).

Now there's one extra difficulty which I'd like to get out of the way. It's editing and publishing an RSS-imported post.

Since these posts are imported as Drafts, to publish them you need to go in the post editor. But for RSS-imported posts it only opens up the basic markdown editor on my side. Not the Rich + markdown editor we are used to.

And in that editor... there's no publish button. Check out what I'm seeing below:

screenshot of basic markdown editor

The only way I've found to publish an RSS-imported post is to modify that piece of text I've highlighted from
published: false to published: true

I mean that's doable but it's an extra step I'd prefer to avoid when explaining to content creators how to crosspost. If these content creators want to edit their posts, it's also a bit unfortunate that they don't get access to the rich+markdown editor too as it's much more user-friendly.

  • Would it be possible to have RSS-imported posts editable in the rich+markdown editor?
  • If not, would it be possible to add a Publish button in the basic markdown editor?

Or am I missing something? My forem's updated to the latest version.

Anyway, have any of you had success with getting people to crosspost using the RSS-import tool? Do you have any tips?

Top comments (5)

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lee profile image
Lee

I think there is something big coming down the dev/feature pipeline that will encourage cross posting and make it easier than rss imports, Ben mentioned it on a previous call, I can't remember what it was but he seemed pretty darn excited about it.

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rayan profile image
Rayan Nait Mazi

Oh I'd love to hear about it

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rayan profile image
Rayan Nait Mazi

@ellativity @michaeltharrington do you see what I mean? I think this could be very useful to those of us trying to "ignite the cross posting flywheel" as @lee said on this other thread:
forem.dev/ellativity/what-would-he...

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ternox profile image
Ternox

Thank you for your instruction! If possible, I will translate it into Ukrainian and use it for my website.

But I'm facing the same problem you described. It seems that posts exported from WordPress cannot be used with rich markdown.

I also faced the problem that almost no one on this site responds to anyone, which is quite sad.

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gilzow profile image
Paul Gilzow

@rayan did you ever find a better way to bulk publish after an import?