Finally got around to writing some kind of doc for my mail posting script for WordPress. And I can therefore finally release it for the world to use and enjoy.
Please welcome a new member in the WP plugin & hack family: wp-keitaimail v. 1.0b!
Actually, it is not technically a plugin, nor a hack, rather a standalone script that interfaces with WP to let you post entries to your blog via Email.
The name ‘keitai’ simply means ‘cell phone’ in Japanese… This script might as well have been called wp-cellphone-mail, I just liked the sound of ‘keitai’.
You can see a working demo on the right-hand side of this blog where it powers the “keitai log”. I have been using it for nearly a month now and it should be really stable albeit a tad complicated to set up (see below).
A quick roundabouts of the current features:
- works as a script executed on email reception (unlike WP’s built-in feature), which means you do not have to run a cron job and your posts appear instantaneously on your blog.
- handles jpeg pictures, will automatically create a thumbnail if they are too big and insert all necessary code in your post.
- can be run on a separate machine from your WP install: it uses xmlrpc to post the entry and can be set to use ftp to upload the picture files.
- can handle as many blogs and authors as you want. For each email account you can customize any aspect of the posts (image formatting, posting category etc). For example, you can easily set up the script to let 5 authors post to your blog with each one under a different category.
Now for the bad news:
This script is not trivial to set up. I have tried to include very detailed instructions that should supposedly be enough for even non technical-minded people. But hooking up the script to the email address can be somewhat complicated, and more importantly, it heavily depends on each hosting solution… which makes it quite hard to document.
Overall, you should be fine if you have ONE of the following:
- A “mail forward” feature in your server control panel (especially if the control panel in question uses the very common ‘cpanel’ solution) that lets you forward mails to a script (it usually does).
- a file entitled .procmailrc in your server root (meaning your mail server uses procmail).
- an Exim recipe file. However, you will need to know how to edit it (or look it up online, it’s not that hard), since I haven’t had time to write instructions for Exim.
OR
OR
If you think you have one of these, check out the full instructions in keitai-prefs.php for details on hooking the script and set it to use your blog. I tried to be as clear as possible, but if you run into any problems using them, please let me know. You do not have to be a programmer or know anything about PHP to use this script, however, it is probably a good idea to hold on for now if you are not comfortable editing a settings file manually and tweaking around your server settings.
Hopefully, next release (date very much unknown) will make a lot of this easier.
In the meantime, if you wanna use this wonderful little toy, just download the archive here. Unzip it, edit the keitai-prefs.php file, following the detailed instructions it contains and upload the whole lot to your server. The script doesn’t need to be inside your web root (somewhere inside the ‘www’ or ‘public_html’ folders) since it is not accessed through the web, actually, it is preferable if it is not.
Among the features I plan to add for an hypothetical 1.2 version are:
- Simpler interface to edit the script preferences
- POP3 support (if you want to use it like WP’s built in script).
- Password protection for posting.
- Access to post settings through email commands (e.g. you could choose the category to post it to).
- Support for more media types (movies, other graphic formats).
- Support for GPS coordinates.
- Full kanji support. Although this seems to be problem with the xmlrpc lib, the script has troubles with emails containing kanjis as of now. YMMV though.
- Support for EXIF data
- Better cleaning of content: remove unnecessary new lines etc. (allow textile parsing?)
as well as:
All that depending on the level of interest and the time I will be able to spend on it (not much for now). If you’d like to see other features or are having issue getting the script to work correctly, please let me know.
Enjoy!
Sorry for the previous post – I had not set the path correctly – Now I am having a different problem altogether – have posted the error message below
—— pipe to |php /home/ashwinku/public_html/wp-keitaimail/wp-keitaimail.php
generated by ***@ashwinkumar.net ——
PHP: Error parsing /usr/local/lib/php.ini on line 272
Turck MMCache requires Zend Engine API version 20021010.
The Zend Engine API version 220040412 which is installed, is newer.
Contact Dmitry Stogov at http://turck-mmcache.sourceforge.net for a later version of Turck MMCache.
Content-type: text/html
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.3
Warning: main(/home/ashwinku/public_html/blog/wp-includes/class-xmlrpc.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/ashwinku/public_html/wp-keitaimail/wp-keitaimail.php on line 31
Fatal error: main() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘/home/ashwinku/public_html/blog/wp-includes/class-xmlrpc.php’ (include_path=’/home/ashwinku/public_html/wp-keitaimail/:.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/ashwinku/public_html/wp-keitaimail/wp-keitaimail.php on line 31
—— This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ——
Hi. I love this program.
Let me leave some information for qmail users.
-go to the root directory and find a .qmail-accountname file. Edit it like this,
./.panel/users/*youre-mailaccountname*/
|/usr/local/bin/php /home/*yourdomein*/public_html/*yourdirectry*/wp-keitaimail/wp-keitaimail.php
Hi, Dr. Dave.
If you don’t mind, may I ask how to set up the latest updated pictures on the sidebar like your blog?
I just like to show several thumbnaills and link to the post that has the picture.
Gogh:
Magic of PHP… Hasn’t got anything to do with wp-keitai-mail, all custom PHP code that fetches the posts and cull them in this sort… When I have a sec, I might release such a theme one day… don’t hold your breath though (bit busy these days).
Hi, Dr. Dave.
Is it possible to post images as excerpt via keitai? I mean I like to put an attached image into the excerpt form.
The reason is that there is a plugin that generates thumbails from excerpt fields and display them randomly.
If it takes a lot of work for you, please never mind.
Cool script!
A nice feature would be to be able to call the script using Cron, and it would poll a specified POP account for mail and insert into the blog.
That would make the script much easier to implement for people without an own mail server.
Great job though!
Has anyone used this successfully with PHP5? I seem to be hitting a bug in mimedecode.php that causes the script to throw:
“Fatal error: Using $this when not in object context”
It looks like this is fixed in mimedecode.php 1.40 or greater but I’m still not having luck. If anyone has suggestions I’d be appreciative.
I found a solution
It looks like the syntax for calling mimedecode.php has changed in PHP 5.x, so a slight tweek to the wp-keitaimail.php was all that was needed to get it working again.
I’ll drop Dr. Dave an email with the fix.
I installed the script and sent a few messages – it works nice
but I’ve got a problem with Polish characters such as ó ę ź ć etc. There are some incorrect letters displayed instead. I tried setting up UTF-8 and some other encodings in the Thunderbird, but it didn’t help. Is there any solution for this?
Have probs. when I try put pics by mms! Just don’t publish thoses pictures anyone?
What is the exact command line I have to use, while connected through SSH to my acount, to forward an e-mail address (example at exampledomain dot com) to a file in my hosting account exampledomain.com/wpblog/content/file.php
Thanks in advance.
Juanfer, there’s no way for any of us to know what the exact command line you have to use is. Please contact your hosting provider for assistance.
Hello,
How can we improve the script to manage category… I would like usage like
subject of the mail : [category]Title of the article
mail : article
idea?
Pascal
Modified e-mail to blog.
I’ve modified Dr. Dave’s “WP-keitai-mail Plugin” to work with b2evo (originally it is made for WordPress blog system ).
It was simple – just had to change the format that the XML data was sent in.
The result, I have e-mail-to-blog functionality…
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