WordPress may not be the cool new blogging platform these days, but it is the serious CMS that powers so many sites (AppStorm included). And it’s still a pretty nice platform, one that for the most part works great and — thanks to the huge ecosystem of themes and plugins — can be almost anything you want it to be. But at the end of the day, WordPress is most often used for blogging. And to blog effectively, you’re usually scheduling posts and social media messages quite a bit.
But WordPress is pretty bad at scheduling, and even worse at social media integration. Almost daily I have to click the Quick Edit link on scheduled posts to double-check what time they’re scheduled for, and then use a combination of IFTTT and Buffer to take care of social media posts.
CoSchedule, though, is the one app that could change that. It’s a WordPress plugin that makes post scheduling as simple as a drag-and-drop, and then makes it just as easy to share post on your social networks.
WordPress, redesigned around a calendar
CoSchedule brings to WordPress’s post scheduling something that should have been there all along: a drag-and-drop calendar. It’s a simple and obvious addition, one that makes keeping your posts going out on a regular basis far simpler than before. It then throws in
Here’s how it works. You setup an account with CoSchedule (free 2 week trial, then $10/month after that), install the plugin from the WordPress.org directory inside WordPress, and login with your CoSchedule account. Seconds later, you’ll be able to see all of your WordPress posts on a calendar where you can drag them around to the date you’d like. Or, you can drag a post off to the Drafts list on the right to save it for later. In the same way, you can see all of your Draft and Pending Review posts just by hovering over the right side, and can drag-and-drop them to the date on the calendar you want. It’s simple and easy.
Then, there’s social media integration that’d remove your need for any other professional social marketing tools for your blog. Whenever you’re scheduling a post, you can also schedule a social post across all of your social networks for the same time or any other time you want, using simple dates like one day later. You can even schedule comments to appear on the post at that time as well, or add tasks that you’ll need to complete on that date — yes, CoSchedule gives you a basic way to manage tasks with your team as well, all from inside WordPress. Then, if you hover over a date on your calendar, you can start a new draft blog post on that date right from the calendar, or schedule a social media post for that day on its own aside from your WordPress posts.
Now, at the moment, there’s still a few issues with CoSchedule. It tends to log you out of your account whenever you close your WordPress window, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to set precisely what time posts will automatically be published on certain days. It’d be nice to be able to set a calendar, Buffer style, and have it automatically fill the time slots you like on specific dates. But even as it is, if you’re not too picky, CoSchedule can reduce your tedious work of scheduling posts to a simple drag-and-drop — even for draft and pending review posts. And with the social media integration — and basic task management as well — it’s got everything you could need to manage a team blog. All of that, for $10 a month — exactly the price of one Buffer Pro account.
CoSchedule seems like the perfect solution for managing a large WordPress blog with a complex schedule, and if anything, it’s only surprising no one has done this before now. If you’ve found scheduling posts and keeping your social media accounts filled was too much work, CoSchedule is the app you should try. It’s really a very nicely done solution for blog management.
