Press This
Press This is a little tool that lets you grab bits of the web and create new posts with ease. It will even allow you to choose from images or videos included on the page and use them in your post. Use Press This as a quick and lightweight way to highlight another page on the web.
Version 2.0 – Gutenberg Block Editor
Press This 2.0 brings the modern WordPress block editor experience to the bookmarklet popup. You can now compose posts using familiar blocks like Paragraph, Heading, Image, Quote, List, and Embed.
New Features:
- Gutenberg Block Editor – Full block editor integration for a consistent WordPress editing experience
- Smart Post Format Suggestions – Automatically suggests Video, Quote, or Link formats based on content
- Enhanced Content Extraction – Improved scraping with JSON-LD structured data support
- Client-Side Only Scraping – All content extraction happens in your browser for better privacy and security
- Featured Image Support – Set any scraped image as your post’s featured image
- Improved Media Grid – Better thumbnail display with support for video and audio embeds
Filters for Developers
Press This 2.0 includes new filters for customization:
press_this_allowed_blocks– Customize which blocks are available in the editorpress_this_post_format_suggestion– Modify the auto-suggested post format
See the Developer Documentation section below for details.
Contributing
Bugs and PRs can be submitted via https://github.com/WordPress/press-this .
Developer Documentation
New Hooks and Filters in 2.0
press_this_allowed_blocks
Customize which blocks are available in the Press This editor.
add_filter( 'press_this_allowed_blocks', function( $blocks ) {
// Add the gallery block
$blocks[] = 'core/gallery';
// Remove the embed block
$blocks = array_filter( $blocks, function( $block ) {
return $block !== 'core/embed';
} );
return $blocks;
} );
Default blocks: core/paragraph, core/heading, core/image, core/quote, core/list, core/list-item, core/embed
press_this_post_format_suggestion
Modify or override the auto-suggested post format based on content.
add_filter( 'press_this_post_format_suggestion', function( $suggested_format, $data ) {
// If the URL contains 'podcast', suggest audio format
if ( ! empty( $data['u'] ) && strpos( $data['u'], 'podcast' ) !== false ) {
return 'audio';
}
return $suggested_format;
}, 10, 2 );
The $data array contains scraped content including:
– u – Source URL
– s – Selected text
– t – Page title
– _images – Array of image URLs
– _embeds – Array of embed URLs
– _meta – Meta tag data
– _jsonld – JSON-LD structured data
Preserved Hooks from 1.x
All existing hooks continue to work:
press_this_redirect_in_parent– Control post-save redirect behaviorpress_this_save_post– Filter post data before savingpress_this_save_redirect– Filter redirect URL after saveenable_press_this_media_discovery– Toggle media scrapingpress_this_data– Filter the complete scraped data arraypress_this_suggested_html– Filter default content templatesshortcut_link– Customize the bookmarklet URL
History
WordPress, from the earliest days, included some way to bring in snippets from other websites for you to post on your own.
The original “Press It” was removed from WordPress 2.5 and a new “Press This” added in 2.6. It existed pretty much unchanged until WordPress 4.2, which completely refreshed Press This.
In WordPress 4.9, Press This was spun out to a “canonical plugin” — an official plugin from WordPress.org so sites who wanted to use it could, but streamline more niche functionality out of Core. This was previously done with the Importers.
In version 2.0, Press This was modernized to use the Gutenberg block editor, bringing it in line with the modern WordPress editing experience while maintaining backward compatibility with existing installations.