We (@freelance.monkey and @rexthetech) are really enjoying working with @pennsif.witness on our Press4Steem WordPress plugin.

Development is going really well, and we expect to publicly release the plugin in coming days!

Changes

There's not much visually different to our first presentation. Most changes have been on the coding side:

• Got rid of mixed jQuery/native JS code
• Fixed namespace issues for maximum compatibility with other WordPress plugins
• Added an AJAX spinner while Press4Steem is communicating with the Steem API node
• Added extensive error handling
• Posts now create much prettier permlinks, for better SEO

To-Do List

• Support editing of posts. When a post has already been posted to the Steem blockchain, but then edited in WordPress, we want the plugin to offer to edit the post on Steem to match. It turns out that the Steem blockchain supports content patching to edit posts; we don't need to resubmit the entire body of the post onto the blockchain, instead we can send an efficient list of changes.

We have other features planned, but the only feature we consider essential for launch is post editing support, so we'll save those for later!

Thoughts on Canonicality

@ubongudofot mentioned issues around duplicating content, so I want to briefly mention that. I think similar discussions were probably had when the previous WordPress-to-Steem bridge (SteemPress) was being developed.

Search engines such as Google like there to ideally only be one copy of any given piece of content. They would really like a blog post, for example, to only appear on a single domain, rather than being copied around the place.

In the situation where that is the case, they call that single authoritative source canonical.

Search engines started bothering about this in the first place because there were a lot of clone sites using very simple techniques of ripping off content from other sites to generate traffic through fake SEO.

In fact, they started caring so much that there was even an HTML tag introduced to indicate which copy of a given page was the "master" copy, rel='canonical'.

Now, that's all fine, but the thing is that Google was not built to understand Steem! We have a decentralised social network, where the "master copy" of any piece of content is inside the blockchain itself.

Steemit.com certainly isn't the canonical source of that content; it can be viewed on any alternative Condenser deployment, or any alternative Steem front end.

Google's concept of canonicality doesn't really make sense in this context. For that reason, we're not really worried about the thorny issues that would crop up in practically any other crossposting situation!

However, it's worth mentioning that if desired, the WordPress blog owner can absolutely choose to use the canonical tag on the WordPress side, to indicate to search engines that the WordPress blog is the authoritative source of a post. This should prevent any negative effects from Google's lack of understanding about Steem!

Please vote for our Witness Campaigns!

Every Steemian has 30 "Witness Votes" they can use to show their appreciation to witnesses. It doesn't cost anything to do, and you can change or remove your votes at any time.

Both @pennsif.witness and @steemwow would love to have your witness vote support so that we can keep on bringing you cool joint projects like this one 😊

From the Steemit Wallet Witness List, just click our up arrows: