Curating round-up, best-of and weekly highlight type posts is now so easy with MyCurator. With the [Multi] tag on your Training Posts page you can flag and then curate multiple posts into one new curated post that goes live on your blog. Each Topic can have its own set of [Multi] tagged posts. When you [Make Live] any one of the [Multi] posts, all of the [Multi] posts for that Topic will be available in the WordPress editor.
Flagging Posts using the [Multi] tag
When you click on the [Multi] tag for a post on your Training Posts page, that post is given a Relevance of multi. You can flag as many posts as you like with the [Multi] flag. If you need to change a post back to another Relevance status and remove it from your[Multi] posts, choose the [Edit] button under the title, near the date. You can then change the Relevance tag back to ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘not sure’ using the widget to the right in the Training Post edit page.
Curating Multiple Training Posts into One New Live Post
To begin curating a round-up or highlight type post, choose your ‘lead’ article and click the [Make Live] tag. The lead article will be the initial title of the post, and the article snippet and attribution link will be placed into the editor screen just like when you curate a single post. The difference is that all of the articles on your Training Post page within the same Topic that are flagged as Multi will also have their full text and images available in the Saved Page meta box below the editor window (see the screen snippet below for an example).
You will see a tab for each article that is flagged as [Multi] for this Topic. Article 1 is your lead article. You can click on a tab and it will reveal the full text and images of one of the [Multi] articles. The Title and attribution link are at the top.
The Click Copy feature is available in all of the article tabs. You can see that when you roll your cursor through the Saved Page meta box, each paragraph, list and table will be highlighted in yellow. Just click while the element you want is highlighted and it will be immediately inserted into the post at the current cursor.
Similarly, just click on an image and a dialog box will open up. If you choose Insert, the image will be inserted into the post at the current cursor position, with the alignment and size you’ve chosen. If you choose Featured, then the image will become the Featured Image for the post (alignment and size are ignored). In either case you can set the title/alt tag for SEO, with the post title as the default value.
Publishing your Curated Post
When MyCurator moves the lead article Training post to the WordPress editor, it sets the post to Draft. You can continue to save the post as Draft until you are ready to post it live to your blog. All of the [Multi] flagged articles will continue to be available, even if you leave the editor and do something else.
When you are ready, just click Publish and the post will be published to your live blog. At this point, MyCurator will ‘trash’ All of the [Multi] posts for this Topic only. If you were to edit the final post after it is published, you would only see the lead article full text and images. This cleanup means you don’t have to manually delete old [Multi] training posts after you have used them.
Recovering used [Multi] Posts
After a [Multi] post has been published, all of the [Multi] tagged articles for that Topic on the Training Post page will be trashed (except the lead article, which is also gone as it became the new blog post). You can go to the Training Posts menu item in the Dashboard (usually under Comments) to see a list of all of your Training Posts. Choose the Trash link at the top left and you will filter to only the trashed posts. You can restore any Training posts that you would like to re-use for another [Multi] curation for that Topic.
Important: MyCurator automatically removes Training posts after a certain number of days that is set in your Options page. Make sure that you have the Option field “Keep Training Posts for How Many Days?” set to a number of days that gives you time to find, flag and curate multiple items. Especially if you want to re-use some Training Posts, you should extend this value even longer.