When inspiration hits, I usually have enough mental fuel for a few posts. I’ll sit down to write, and a few hours later I’ll have a cluster of posts ready to publish. Readers don’t consume posts in clusters though, especially when they’re from the same author. Because my writing habits don’t match reader habits, it makes sense to schedule content across multiple days so as not to overwhelm the rad people that read my posts.
Scheduling posts is hard work
There are a few really great editorial calendar plugins for WordPress. My favorite used to be Editorial Calendar, and for some it’s a decent solution— but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Because I have multiple types of posts on my site (coffee, art, events, etc), I have multiple custom post types to accommodate differing layouts, information, and structured data. Coffee posts have information about the particular brew, while event posts have venue information. The problem? The Editorial Calendar plugin doesn’t work well with custom post types. And, it’s not just Editorial Calendar. Every other WordPress editorial calendar plugin that I’ve tested (and I’ve tested most of them) gets clunky when it comes to CPTs.
Lets assume for a second though, that the editorial calendar you use accommodates custom post types brilliantly. What if your editorial calendar allowed you to schedule or buffer social media posts? What if it allowed you to create advanced workflows to send post tasks or preview URLs (like writing social posts) to team members. What if you were able to drag and drop posts onto a highly customized calendar for scheduling in real-time?
The perfect WordPress editorial calendar
I rarely review services, so when I do, it’s usually because the service has relieved some major pain in my life.
CoSchedule is nothing less than brilliant, and they’re adding features every day. Even though the CoSchedule web service is independent from WordPress, it’s tightly integrated and makes it easy to manage posts from both the calendar interface in CoSchedule and the post interface in WordPress. In-fact, by giving a client only the CoSchedule login to produce content, they’ll never have access to the WordPress admin to accidentally make a change to a critical setting. Gone are the days of locking down wp-admin for that ‘over active’ client.
From social scheduling to advanced workflows to handling custom post types seamlessly, it’s the end-all-be-all of WordPress editorial calendars.
Whether it’s for you or a creative client, scoot over to CoSchedule to see more. Oh, and yes… this article was scheduled and published using CoSchedule. 🙂
So, do you use CoSchedule? Something else? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.