Better Formats vs IFTTT Post Formats & Post Types

This plugin is intended to improve the usability of WordPress’s built-in Post Formats feature exclusively through some key changes in design. The unhelpful list of radio buttons is replaced with with Retina-compatible icons, format titles, and brief, helpful descriptions of each format. Instead of dramatically changing the way WordPress works, Better Formats simply tries to make the existing WordPress Post Formats feature more friendly and informative. Additional user-centric improvements are planned. This initial release is intended to help spur conversation about Post Format improvements currently being considered for WordPress core.

IFTTT (if this, then that) is one of the coolest web services available, and allows you to connect your different web service accounts to create ‘recipes’. An example of a recipe that I have is to create a new WordPress post on my blog whenever I favorite a YouTube video. Unfortunately IFTTT doesn’t have a way to specify a post format or a custom post type, so this plugin provides a couple ways to update them. To set the post format, you need to set the category in IFTTT to one of the following categories: ifttt-aside ifttt-gallery ifttt-link ifttt-image ifttt-quote ifttt-status ifttt-video ifttt-audio ifttt-chat So for my YouTube -> WordPress recipe, I have it adding the ‘ifttt-video’ category in IFTTT (IFTTT allows you to specify the category for the posts it creates), and voilà, when it’s published, the format has been set. If you want to instead set the new post to a custom post type, you can do so by setting the category in IFTTT to one that matches this pattern: ifttt-posttype-{post_type_slug}. So if you wanted to create new WordPress pages with IFTTT, you would add the ifttt-posttype-page category. And finally, if you want the IFTTT categories to be stored as a different taxonomy, you can do so by setting the category in IFTTT to one that matches this pattern: ifttt-taxonomy-{taxonomy_slug}. Note: These speciall ifttt-* categories will not actually be set on the post/page/object. These are ‘special’ categories which simply serve as flags for which post format, post-type or taxonomy to send the data to, and they are removed from the list of categories which are actually stored to the post. Hope you find this useful! Feel free to contribute to or fork this plugin on github.