CogniDox WordPress Blog Plug-in: Streamlining Document Management

We moved our CogniDox blog from using a Joomla extension to WordPress a while back. You may have seen us release an open-source project called WordBridge where we can create the blog in WordPress and have it appear on our Joomla-managed website.

That still left an un-met need for us, because we wanted a way to manage the Blog text within CogniDox. There are basic issues of version control and review workflows that don’t exist within blogging tools such as WordPress (and content management tools such as Joomla, as well).

It’s not so bad for us being a small company, but in a bigger company it’s a pain. Someone has to marshal all the blog contributors and come up with a schedule for who writes what, and when. Then they have to chase those authors and conduct “reviews” through email attachments. I’m sure that more than a few draft versions get published by mistake. It’s easy to update a blog post so it will never be seen again. Right?

That seems crazy if you already have a document management system. True, you could manage the document and manually wrangle it into the blog editor when it’s ready, but that’s so old-school and is prone to error too.

So we created the CogniDox WordPress Blog Plugin.

To use it, you do some basic configuration to tell CogniDox where to post your blog (e.g. http://cognidox.wordpress.com  in our case).

Then you write your blog using your normal word processor. I’m using Word 2010 at the moment for this entry. You upload it into CogniDox as normal. You ask your colleagues to review it, and finally get it approved.

Then you just choose a new action called “Send latest approved version to WordPress”. CogniDox takes the original document and prepares it for web publishing. You get to see a preview, and you can select what categories and tabs you want. Once you like the results just click the Post to WordPress button and off it goes.

Once it’s in our WordPress.com account, it’s then bridged to our Joomla site using WordBridge. We never have to log into either the WordPress admin or the Joomla admin pages.

If you have a CogniDox subscription you can get the plug-in from the support site:

VI-402305-LS (issue 1) - CogniDox WordPress Blog Plugin

https://support.cognidox.com/cognidox/view/VI-402305-LS