2 Plugins That Make Including Identical Content Across Multiple Posts Easy

I often like to repeat myself. It can be a good habit, especially on the internet, as people don’t seem to read that intently. How many times has a reader of your blog emailed you regarding a particular post with a question, even though that very question was answered in the post itself? I’ve personally lost count.

So there is nothing wrong with trying to hammer a message home, and we all have cause for repeating the same information on multiple occasions, and across multiple posts.

For instance, on my own personal blog I like to be completely transparent with my readers, so I make a point of including a disclaimer on any post in which I have included affiliate links. That disclaimer text is always the same, and every time I want to include it I find the most recent post that last utilized it, and copy and paste the text.

It would be fair to say that my method is not particularly efficient – nor is it future proof. What if I wanted to change the wording of my disclaimer in the future? I would have to go back and change each piece of text individually. That wouldn’t be much fun at all.

The Solution

There are many ways to improve upon my method above, but today I discovered one that does the job particularly well, so I thought I would share it with you. The solution comes in the form of two plugins: RPS Include Content and RPS Blog Info.

It’s very simple. RPS Include Content allows you to pull content from one blog post and insert it into another. Using my example above, I would create a blog post with my disclaimer text, then use the relevant shortcode to include the content within any other blog post I please.

In order to pull content, you just need to know the relevant post’s ID and include it within the shortcode, as shown below:

Getting that information (and more) at your fingertips is a piece of cake. Just install and activate RPS Blog Info, and the relevant information will be displayed in your toolbar:

When you view your post as an administrator, the included content will be marked appropriately. Furthermore, when you hover over the content it will become highlighted, and you’ll have the option to view the included post itself or edit it:

If you don’t want the included blog post to be visible on its own, no problem – just mark it as private in the Publish widget on the post screen. It will not display by itself, but its content will still show when included in other blog posts.

Extra Features

Another cool thing about RPS Include Content is that it is multisite aware – you can pull posts from other sites in the same network. You can also choose to include the title of the included post and if you do, the size of the <h> tag.

Including posts that also have includes is not a problem, and the plugin prevents include loops (so that you don’t accidentally create an endless post). Further information can be found in the RPS Include Content FAQ.

All in all, these two plugins provide a slick and easy way of including content across multiple posts.

Download RPS Include Content here, and RPS Blog Info here.

Tags:

• headers