Publish to ClassicPress from Ulysses

Hi everyone!

This is a quick tutorial to show how to publish from the Ulysses writing app to ClassicPress.

Ulysses has had the ability to publish to both self-hosted and commercial WordPress for several years. I was curious to find out if it will also work with ClassicPress.

What is Ulysses?

Ulysses is a writing app for MacOS and iOS/iPadOS. Text is written in Markdown, or Markdown XL as they like to call it, there are proofing tools for several languages, and more. Check out their website to learn more.

Setting up

After you’ve written a sheet in Ulysses, select the Preview option. Switch the preview to Publishing. If there hasn’t been an account added yet, add one now, and choose “self-hosted WordPress”.

In the next step, fill in the web site URL, user name and password of the author account. After you’re done, click OK, and Ulysses will verify the credentials and add the account.

By default, Ulysses uses Twenty-Twenty-One as the preview for posts that are to be published to WordPress. However, for better resemblance, I suggest to download and install the Twenty-Seventeen export preview theme. But this is purely optional.

Publishing

Now that you’ve added the account, it is preselected in the Publishing popup box. In the toolbar, click Publish.

You will first be notified that the first first-level heading is being used as the title, and that attached notes and tags can be converted into existing categories if they match what’s already in your installation of WordPress (or ClassicPress). This will only be shown once. After you dismiss that, you can fill in the publishing details, and choose what to do once the publishing process has concluded. By default, Ulysses will redirect you to your installation with the editor open so you can verify that everything was transferred correctly, and then hit the Publish button in your ClassicPress.

Nice touch: In the publishing screen, Ulysses noticed without any problem that this is a “WordPress” without the block editor, and chose the HTML export format, not the WP 5.0 block format, by default, so everything works as it should.

Updating posts

Since the new version 22, Ulysses gained the ability to update WordPress posts as well if the sheet has been published to this account before. It will automatically offer to update the post. it will do that without problems for ClassicPress, too.

In summary

It is perfectly fine to publish to ClassicPress from Ulysses, without problems. Ulysses recognizes ClassicPress as a WordPress without the block editor, and makes the correct choices for the export format. It also transfers categories and tags correctly from its publishing dialog to your ClassicPress site.

So, even if you are still on WordPress, but thinking of migrating to ClassicPress, you won’t lose the ability to publish to your blog from Ulysses. Isn’t that awesome!

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