We know the hardest part of blogging is actually writing posts. And most blogging software, and even word processors, do little to help writers write. Today at WordPress.com we’re proud to announce a new kind of feature, aimed at helping the writing process, called Writing Helper. It’s a new box that appears underneath the edit box on the Add a Post Screen (the entire box can be dragged to the right side if you want it next to the edit box, instead of underneath).

First up is Copy A Post. You can now reuse the hard work of previous posts as the basis for the next one. Simply hit the Copy A Post button, pick a post, and we copy the title, content, tags and categories for you, saving you steps. If you often have similarly tagged or formatted posts, this will save much time. We will always show your most recent posts in the list, but you can search by title too.

Next is Request Feedback. You can now share a private draft of a post with a friend before it is published. They can help you find typos, suggest improvements and give advice to make the post amazing before you publish it to the world.

When you click on Request Feedback, you can enter email addresses of friends who are willing to help. They’ll receive a special private link to see your draft, where they can leave feedback on your post (see image above). Their feedback will appear in your post’s Request Feedback area when it arrives, so you can make changes to your draft accordingly.
For more about how Writing Helper works, read the support pages for Copy a Post and Request Feedback.
And if you have ideas for other Writing Helper features you’d like to see, leave us a comment.
Awesome. Saves me a few extra steps of copy/pasting/editing tags.
Thanks. Its a really great feature.
*It’s
😉
Outstanding additions. I noticed these features today.
I particularly like the “Request Feedback” function. As someone who writes business posts for other blogs, this will beat the back and forth of review & edit emails, skype uploads, etc., that we go through each week.
This also helps me when I want a friend to take a look at one of my own blog posts for content, grammar, etc.
Thank you for simplifying my life. You rock! 🙂
I noticed this cool little featured today. Of course i tried it out already without knowing what i was doing 🙂 I’m open to feedback anytime! Thanks!!!
YES! less plugin more indiginous capability. Bravo.
I just hit the Copy A Poste button . . . and nothing happened.
Try hitting the Copy A Post button – it works much better than the Copy A Poste button does.
Seriously, if it’s sill not working, contact support.
Fantastic! Great features to add. I’m especially excited about the copy feature.
Great.. thanks!
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feliz quando faz aquilo que gosta.
Great article,Thank you.
Copy a post? That seems not so great.
Leoch: Fair enough. What would be great? This comment box is equally good at accepting ideas, as it is critiques.
The “Copy a post” function is exactly what has been needed. Have been MANY times in my short blogging “career” that I wished that I had this function. Thanks!
I haven’t used the new features. I agree on that each article is different and even when past information may be needed, I would not simply copy it word by word unless it is a quote. As for the search feature, I hope it is better than the current one, because it is really poor. I sometimes type a word or a sentence when trying to look for articles and more often than not, I get zero matching results.
As a suggestion, I would certainly appreciate more widgets I could use on my site. The current ones are good but there are some things I would love to add that don’t exist. Example, a video window without having to buy the video feature or without having to post it through a website such as vodpod. Just a thought.
Thank you for the copy feature. I was wondering if WordPress had this feature. I’ll be using it daily.
amazing!!!!! this is totally gonna help!!!
Sound great.
Blogging is posting, posting is writing; anything you’re gonna post in a blog, you have to write. Even it is a photo blog or video blog. WordPress is about how to press words.
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Why WordPress so late announcing this writing tools? 😦
I definitely really like it. ……………………………………………….. 4 thumbs up! 😀
IMPORTANT AND USEFUL — VERY MUCH.
Exactly, I am going to use these feature
Thank you 🙂
I can only say thank you: It is great help indeed: I never dreamed of posting being so much fun. Thanks again.
George.
yeap!great author ;;;writing make us easy to go on…
This feature sounds good. Will try it as soon as possible. Thank you WordPress.
The new features are kind of lame in my opinion I mean what we really need is something to help us with writers block because if we r bloggers we already like and probably love writing it’s the writers block that sucks
Hi Disturbed:
If you have suggestions for what WordPress can do to help you overcome writers block, let us know. We have some ideas, but would like to hear yours.
Thank you! I have been wishing for both these features for a while now.
This is very helpful. I look forward to your next post.
This should be a nice learning tool for everyone involved. Great idea!
i love chocolates too and cakes 🙂 yummy 🙂 will try out this feature soon 🙂
This is the ultimate time saver! Been praying and wishing for a quicker way to post series without the tedious copy & paste method. You guys just earned a huge ‘You’re awesome’ in my book! Woo hoo!!!!!!!
Thanks so much for doing this. I found Writing Helper earlier today on my blog before I found the link to this post in my email. I’d already used it to copy a template of a post before I read about it here!
Because I do many posts in continuing series with a standard template this is so much easier for me than going back to the previous week and copying from an old post.
Awesome! I cannot wait to try out the new functions and look forward to many more. 🙂
Thanks a bunch. I am only 13 years old so I usually show my post to mum or dad before posting it. Now I can just send them the email and they can look at it when they have time! Time saving! 😀
cool feature from WP
wow wonderful 😀
Thanks a lot.
Its very helpfull
This sounds great.I guess you only have it set up with Facebook,and I really don’t know how hard it would be to enable us to do that same thing,with every single sight,blogg,etc.,on the planet,it would probably be really tough.
I was wondering ,though,if it could be set up one more way,so we could send it to any friend’s,etc.,personal email address,whether they’re a member of WordPress or Facebook,or not? For instance,I have a particular friend who won’t do any social networking/media/markeing yet,and there were a few times that I had printed something I wrote and showed him before posting it.He gave me a great critique as he took a lot of communication courses.
I guess the email recipient would have to agree and they would be made aware that it was private and not going to be seen by anyone but me,and we should just make it a habit to only do the critique and not get much into or any at all,other than the job at hand,and we could do separate emails,as always.
They could accept or deny,and I think that if we were to add only one other,the personal email would make the most sense,the people we have relationships with,even before WordPress,Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn,etc. are most likely to come from our personal emails,and that’s probably where we’d have the largest amount or the most solid of confidants or intimates.Of course,we could befriend someone since WordPress,too,and maybe our relationship would be solely based on sharing expertise,at least,at the beginning.
I would probably want to go to this friend first,and he is not a member and I have to grant him his space to make his own choices.
Oh,and for his critique,He would probably be getting on me for my lack of brevity,awkward structuring or syntax and lack of clarity. Ha
Realtor: Currently it lets you add any email address you like. There is no Facebook or Twitter integration, just a box for you type in as many email addresses as you desire. Give it a try.
AWESOME. Thanks, WP!
This is a great new feature – I would like to back-up kristina who mentioned importing draft posts. I would like the abiity to create template posts for articles on particular subjects, which will be already tagged, formatted and ready to edit and publish.
Will this be rolled out to self-hosted sites too?
Okay, that would work 🙂
Request Feedback feature – fantastic! I used to copy my drafts into an e-mail to a friend for feedback. Looking forward to using this!
Wow. This is so cool. I can’t wait to try it out!
I am very vey happy to know / try this feature.
I remember , I had requested for ‘Template’ feature for my blog
http://sureshbjani.wordpress.com/
where I use a fixed format for various ‘profiles’
. I had to copy it every time I make a new profile.
Now it is very easy , and enables one to maintain a standard format for such posts.
Congratulations, and thanks.
Wow, I suggested the “copy post” as a feature a little while back and WordPress took it on board! EXCELLENT!
For those of you who worry about posts not therefore being unique, most of us only want to copy the tags and the previous layout or references and NOT the actual content. 🙂
Examples: I have a series of archive photo billboards that were set up around The Hague a while back… I went around almost all of them whilst they were still on display and took photos of the “new” as it contrasted with the photo in the same street/location on the billboard as the “old” . Naturally since there were 80+ billboards I will have to post each of them individually and not in one mega-post, but want each to have the same tags, format and layout.
Same thing goes with other reviews I do, …specific photo series, food reviews, cooking and craft demo series etc.
I’m DELIGHTED at this new feature!
THANKS WordPress! Bravo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nice! very handy for a newbie like me 😀
Wao. What a coincident! Would you believe that, just yesterday I was thinking about the ‘copy a post’ feature and I was little angry that wordpress did not have such thing. Today when I was going to write a post I found it bottom there and bingo, I’m the happiest blogger in this world. 🙂 Thanks Scott
Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome, writ large.
Ron: More like Emperor’s ambiguous comment syndrome – can you explain what you mean please? Inquiring minds want to know.
What a brilliant idea – love the feedback idea. I’ve done a couple of mash-ups recently where I’ve used other blogger’s posts as the basis for mine (with their permission) – great to get feedback on the finished article before publihing
Thank you!! The copy feature is perfect for me: I have the same “design” for all posts, before I opened an old post, copied its content from the HTML view and pasted into a new post… now I only need one click! 🙂
Some people say that every post needs to be different… Yes, but this depends on what sort of blog you have! 😉
I am sure the Request Feedback feature would be useful once in a while. Maybe not very often, but it’s nice that it’s there if we need it. A possible use that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that if we want to use copyrighted material in a blog post, this would be a good way to ask for permission to use it (provided we know the copyright holder’s email address). It means they get to see exactly what we plan to do.
i personally have given up attempting to follow or try and use anything from wordpress help page or tutorials they have never worked none of it makes any sense unless you have a qualification in computers , publishing or editing or word which is all impossible for the basic computer user like myself i have had a computer for 19 years and just click on things cant save or do anything else with one despite trying courses its all for computer experts not the basic user.and trying to use these things on here has messed my blog up so i personally think you should simplify them so computer beginers can understand them.someone wanted to promote my blog and asked for me to send a link and someone else said this rub about cut copy and paste none of it works at all so why bother advertising these things in your help thing. sorry to moan .
Sorry that you find WordPress hard to use. I’d recommend trying Learn WordPress.com as it walks you through all the basics. And of course, if you have specific problems, our support team is happy to help you, for free.
Good feature, especially Copy post. Thanks.
This could be very helpful – thank-you. As a blogger for high school science resources, I would use a very similar format many times and have been doing it by hand each time for years. This might actually make things a bit more uniform where they are supposed to be.
A while back I thought ‘I wish I’d started this in Blogger’, as you are able to embed more features in the posts than in WordPress. Since then though, WP has got stronger, with better themes, stats and features like this. Thanks!
On a side note, though – is it possible for us to request some features to be embedded? I would never have started with WordPress or SlideShare, for instance, if they did not have the relationship. I would love to be able to embed educational Prezis, Vimeo videos, Dipity timelines and a few more.
Keep it up!
it also doesnt apear at the bottom of any new post either so that is blatent lie saying it does.
We are still working out the kinks on the Blatant lie feature. Apologies if you’re confused by how it works. Jokes aside, if you don’t see Writing Helper, look at the Screen Options (by clicking the Screen Options button at the top) and make sure Writing Helper is checked.
This is great!!
When I saw the feature ‘Copy a Post’ appearing under ‘Posts’, I almost jumped. It’s totally true for my case with re-using some of the format and tags. Thanks so much!
Excellent functionality!
Thanks.
Fantastic! I have several “category” blogs that use a similar layout, and so far i have had to copy paste them manually, so this will save me a LOT of time!
This really helpful for me in future, as all my posts do share almost the same thing like tag and title format. With this, I no need to everytime open another previous post just to refer how do I format my blog post… ^ ^
Thank you for the hard work! I try to compare the daily visitors for wordpress and blogspot, so far blogspot still has the most visitors compare to wordpress, I believe one day, wordpress may win!!
Thank you for coming up with the “Copy a Post” feature. Indeed I was looking for this for some time. Though no one will repeat a post again, I would need this option when I need to change only the main content data with rest everything remaining the same(like Tags, Formatting, Category and even the post template/sections etc..)..
You guys are doing great work!! Kudos to the WP team!!
Great! I particularly like the Request Feedback feature. Thanks for this!
i was thinking about the feedback option…this is very helpful!
thanks for your new writing helper! A good support is also, that you allow the ZEMANTA search machine to send some links, related to the topics we are writing actually about! For wikipedia I have to search for myself, maybe a similar active support as done by Zemanta could be managed ?
This sounds like some excellent additions to the WordPress environment. Well done.
Thank-you you saved me some time. Love it!
Olá Scott, gostei muito em saber dessa novidade, mas confesso que encontro muitas dificuldades.
gostaria sim que me mandassem uma idéia como devo fazer ok?
Muito obrigada!
Mina!
Probably not something I’d use, but I may play with it. It does sound interesting. In particular, having my kids send me their posts for review before publishing might be helpful to them.
Dear Scott,
This is off-topic, but I just want to note that you’re very diligent and awesome in replying to comments here.
Jenn: thanks. We do our best.
Thank you for the new features. Maybe a new feature that allows you to have the same post available in different languages and use the copy a post feature to help, much like you create parent pages for posts.
quirky, fun, definitely amazing add on.
Wonderful new features! Plan on using them soon.
wow! this is useful feature… thx
Adding transliteration facility similar to Blogger shall make wordpress blogging in regional languages much easeir.
I was so excited when I saw this when I posted this morning. Wonderful feature. It will help a lot. Thank you!
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I think the feedback feature is going to be a lifesaver for me. I always try to have someone look at my writing before I post anything.
Ah, so that’s what Request Feedback is! Welcome addition.
This is a great feature for the formatting alone. It will make blogging on the road so much easier.
i’d love to see a feature which makes it easy to upload a lot of photos at once, without having to insert each one individually
Actually “Copy a post” is what I was looking for right the day before this feature appeared. I had to split a long article in 3 parts and I had to simply copy & paste the content into empty ones. I made quite a mess and had to rewrite some parts.
I agree, each article should be unique and making the tedious operations (copy tags, categories, some formats, etc) automatic lets you focus on content and saves time for proofreading.
Thank you for the additional tools – it all helps to provide our readers with a rewarding experience every time they choose to read our blogs! Thank you WordPress!
Great tool, thanks a lot.
Just would like to say thanks, WordPress! I’m a post-a-day-2011, blogger – this will save gobs of time that i dont have….The feedback request option is terrific, too. Thanks again!
Nice! This is something I really might use in the future