Introducing WP Robot 4

WP Robot 4 is our 4th major release which saw the light of the day on the 5th of November 2013 and brought several cool new features and big enhancements to the WP Robot plugin. This page is meant as a changelog and manual for our customers, explaining the changes and detailing some of the possibilities of the new settings.

Changelog

• New Features
  • Greatly improved image caching: WP Robot now saves all images in an article to your server if activated (also in RSS feeds) and sets a featured image automatically.
  • Rewriting: Moved to separate "All Rewriters" plugin with many new spinning features: Chain rewriting, support for ContentProfessor and the WordAI regular API, new metabox on WordPress "Add New" editor screens for instant spinning.
  • "Options" page: New "Intelligent Keyword Replace" setting. See details below
  • "Options" page: New tab to disable modules you do not intend to use on your blog.
  • Youtube module: Added support for maximum resolution image. Returned by new {thumbnail_large} tag.
  • "Create Campaigns" page: Featured Image setting removed. It is now always on.
  • "Create Campaigns" page: You can now enter a name or an ID into the "Author" setting. WP Robot will create a new user if the name you enter does not exist.
• Interface Changes
  • "Create Campaigns" page: Quick Template Setup button moved from the sidebar to the center templates section
  • "Options" page: Uninstall buttons moved to separate tab for easier access
  • "Templates" page: Module / Post Template tabs at top for easier navigation
  • "Templates" page: Clickable tag buttons next to each template inserts tag directly.
  • Added WP Robot icon to WP navigation menu and plugin headers
• Bugfixes
  • Fixed incompatibility with Google Alerts RSS feeds
  • Fixed Yahoo News language settings
  • Improved error handling and keyword disabling
  • Removed unused and outdated code for speed improvements

Update Instructions

To upgrade you have to overwrite all of your old WP Robot files. Disabling or reinstalling the plugin is not necessary.

To overwrite the files either
- Use a FTP program to upload the whole new "WPRobot3" folder to your "plugins" folder.
or
- Delete WP Robot 3 from the Wordpress "Plugins" screen (your settings wont be lost) and then upload the zip file again with the Wordpress Plugin Installer ("Plugins > Add New").

Download Update: http://wprobot.net/robotpal/sendnew.php

New Feature Explanations

1. Spinning Integration

Rewriter integration saw the biggest changes. All rewritings settings were moved from the "Options" page to the "All Rewriters" page, which is basically a separate plugin we have built and integrated into WP Robot for better rewriter integration, easier updating and more features. You can even download All Rewriters as a stand-alone version too.

These are the advantages and changes of the new system:

• Chain Rewriting: Set up chain rewriting on the "All Rewriters" page to have your content spun by several of our 6 supported rewriter APIs (TheBestSpinner, Spinnerchief, ChimpRewriter, SpinRewriter, WordAI and ContentProfessor) one after the other.
• A new Instant Spinning metabox on the WordPress "Add New" editor screens. It allows you to use any rewriters you have set up on the article you are working on, compare the results and instantly apply it if satisfactory. Go here to see a few images of the new section.
• Support for ContentProfessor was added as our 6th supported rewriter.
• Support for WordAI was improved and their Regular API was implemented besides the Turing one.

2. Intelligent Keyword Replace

You can find this useful new setting on the WP Robot "Options" page. What it does can be a little bit hard to understand, which is why it is best explained with an example:

Let's assume you have a WP Robot post template in your campaign containing 3 modules: Amazon, Youtube and then Yahoo Answers (so it would look like this: {amazon} {youtube} {yahooanswers} ). By default your campaign would contain a keyword that is used to search all 3 of those modules for content. With "Intelligent Keyword Replace" active the keyword is only used to search the first module, in this case Amazon, for content. For the other modules WP Robot then uses the title returned by the 1st module as keyword. Say if the keyword was "Apple iphone" and Amazon returns the "Apple iPhone 4 16GB (Black)" product, then this is the keyword for Youtube and Yahoo Answers. The advantage: Your modules will have more relevant and matching content. You will have a Youtube video fitting the "Apple iPhone 4 16GB (Black)" Amazon product and not one for maybe another iphone model.

To sum up:

• Intelligent Keyword Replace uses the title of the 1st module in your post template as the keyword for all following modules.
• That means it only has an effect if you use more than 1 module in a template.
• The result will be more targeted content for the following modules. However it can also lead to no content being found if the title is too specific, which is why you should use the setting with caution.

3. Improved Image Caching

This update improves the "Save Images to Server" setting on the Options page, which is now set to "on" by default on new blogs and can now save all images in posts WP Robot creates to your server automatically with much more efficiency. The biggest advantage of this change is with the RSS Module. Earlier if a RSS feed in WP Robot contained images as part of the feed content they could not be saved to your server. Now in WP Robot 4 all images in an RSS feed will be downloaded and saved locally as well as a featured image will be set.

4. Disable Modules

You can find the new disable module settings by going to the "Options" page and clicking the disable modules tab at the top. Here you can deselect any modules you do not intend to use on the current blog. After saving the selection those modules are hidden from the Options page, the Templates page and the Create Campaigns screen. You can reenable them at any time.

We hope you enjoy the latest version and as always feedback as well as reports of any problems are welcome.