One of the most popular and useful plugins that have come along in recent years is called the WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin and it helps any publisher keep track of post scheduling and submissions.
To be sure, if you’re just starting out with an article here or there on your blog, you probably won’t need it. But as your momentum and posting activity grows, it will come in very handy.
The calendar provides a clear and broad snapshot of your article submissions and when they may be scheduled to appear live on your site. You might recall that WordPress has a built in scheduling feature, where you can post articles to be immediately visible, or you can set them to go live at any date and time in the future. This way, if you wanted to, you could work on a batch of articles at one time and sort of drip these out to your readers, making it appear that you’ve added content each and every day of the week, (while you’re sitting on a beach sipping on a sasperilla).
Not a bad way to go if you ask me.
Scheduling Posts For Future Release
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If you’re only working on an article or two a week, and want to schedule a post, go to the Publish section which is in the right hand column of the default WP add post screen and you’ll notice it has the term “publish on” followed by a date and time. This is where you can set the schedule for the article release within the post panel. I’ve found this to be simple and easy to do.
Unless you end up working on a whole slew of articles and can’t remember when you scheduled the last one to appear.
That’s where the Editorial Calendar really becomes useful since you can see where everything is set up. Let’s say in my normal state of confusion I ended up having two articles set to go live on the same day. If I want to move a particular article to a new date, I can simply drag it over to another day and I’m done.
Whether you’re an article writing machine, or you have other writers on staff that are helping out, you can probably see how useful this calendar can become as your volume goes up. On larger sites with several category editors that may be posting multiple articles each day, an editorial calendar will become critical to managing a website’s content.
The video below shows the basics of how the calendar works although for some reason, I failed to mention the drag and drop feature which I think is one of the most useful things this plugin can do.