InReview: iziExport

Plug-in gives you a head start in moving content from InDesign to WordPress

iziExport is an Adobe InDesign plug-in that makes it easier to convert InDesign documents to WordPress posts. Developed by Revolumedia, the iziExport website says you can “turn any InDesign article into a new WordPress post in a one-click process.” While it does take only one click to upload InDesign content to a WordPress site, for the content to appear as you intended you first need to spend a few minutes structuring that InDesign content in a way that can be translated into the WordPress post format. WordPress has come a long way since it was purely a blogging platform. The WordPress platform has matured so much that it’s now a popular way to build fully featured websites with sophisticated layouts, incorporating everything from image galleries to online stores. If you have archives of InDesign content that you want to add to a WordPress site, getting that InDesign content to WordPress can typically require copying and pasting the text into WordPress posts or pages, converting and resizing the graphics, and reassembling all of it in WordPress. iziExport takes advantage of several InDesign features to save you steps when moving InDesign content to WordPress. In addition to taking care of the content, it also lets you specify WordPress metadata.

Connecting iziExport to Your WordPress Blog

You can install iziExport by adding it from the iziExport page at the Adobe Add-Ons website. While iziExport is a paid add-on, a full-featured trial version is available; it allows up to 50 exports to each WordPress domain you connect it to. iz-iExport works with self-hosted WordPress installations as well as websites hosted by WordPress.com. After installation, iziExport appears as a panel in InDesign (Figure 1);

choose Window > Extensions > iziExport to open it.

Enter the full path to your WordPress site, along with your username, and your password, and then click Connect. iziExport remembers the last WordPress domain you entered (if you select the Remember Me option) but doesn’t currently let you save login presets for multiple domains, so if you manage more than one WordPress site, you must manually enter or paste your credentials to switch among them. You can disconnect from the current WordPress domain by clicking the unplug icon  in the top right corner of the iziExport panel. After it connects to your WordPress site, the iziExport panel changes to show metadata and export options.

Structuring Your InDesign Document

To get your InDesign content to WordPress, some amount of document structuring is required before you can click the Export button. iziExport first needs to know what content you want to export, and in what order. Here we run into the classic problem of converting InDesign documents to web pages: many InDesign pages are laid out in a way that doesn’t translate directly into the inline layout model of a typical web or WordPress page. Fortunately, iziExport takes advantage of the InDesign features that address this challenge, particularly those that help structure InDesign documents for EPUB or XML. At the most basic level, you need to define the text content of your intended post as a single InDesign article, using the Articles panel (Figure 2).

This allows iziExport to understand which elements to gather together into a single WordPress post. For example, you can select a text frame and three graphics and add them all to an InDesign article; when you select that article and run iziExport, all of the objects in that article become part of a new WordPress post draft. I decided to create a post from the material under one heading of a book, but the topic was part of a very long multi-page story containing all of the topics in that chapter. To be able to add just the three pages of material under that heading, I had to extract just the text under that heading into its own story that could be added to the Articles panel. Of course you may have lots of InDesign content that isn’t simply a text frame or individual graphic. iziExport has ways of handling other variations in content and layout. Exporting Graphics The graphics in a WordPress post need to be formatted properly for web pages, but the graphics in many InDesign documents may be in formats and resolutions optimized for print or other media. If graphics are included in the article selected for export, iziExport includes them in the draft post. iziExport converts both bitmap and vector formats (including graphics created in InDesign) into JPEG images optimized for the web using high-quality compression at 150 ppi, which helps keep them sharp on today’s higher-resolution displays. The optimization is completely automatic, and for now the settings aren’t adjustable. The images in the resulting WordPress post are also available in your WordPress site’s Media Library (Figure 3) so that you can manage them along with the other graphics on the site. It’s typical for a WordPress post to have a feature image that appears between the title and the main text, and also visually represents the post as a thumbnail preview. The first image in an InDesign article can automatically become the feature image in the WordPress post if you select the Feature Image option in the iziExport panel. Exporting Related Objects If you want multiple objects to appear in a WordPress post as a unit, those objects must be grouped before you add them to an InDesign article for iziExport. For example, you need to group an image with its caption text frame, or an arrangement of images that needs to be preserved. Preparing a document for iziExport may involve going through it page by page to group objects as needed. Exporting Anchored Objects iziExport can include objects anchored within a story. Anchored text frames appear inline within the post, but all anchored graphics appear at the end of the post as an image gallery; you may want to manually redistribute those within the post (Figure 4). If an anchored frame contains both text and graphics, you’ll want to group those objects into a single unit. Any text in that anchored group will be rasterized. Tagging Content Types To preserve formatting, you can save a lot of production time in WordPress by using the Tags panel in InDesign to apply tags to InDesign content. Tags tell iziExport how to interpret various types of content, and how to associate InDesign content formats with WordPress content formats. iziExport supports basic and advanced/custom tags. The basic tags are title, main text, image, and caption. In a basic document, you might tag a story as “text,” a graphic as “image,” and the image’s caption as “caption,” so that iziExport can assign the proper formatting for WordPress (Figure 5). If your InDesign document uses paragraph styles, it’s a good idea to use the Map Styles to Tags feature (in the Tags panel menu). For example, the anchored tips in my InDesign document used the Tip/Note Text paragraph style. I wanted iziExport to convert those into the CSS blockquote style in WordPress, so in InDesign I created a blockquote tag, and mapped the Tip/Note Text style to that tag (Figure 6). If you’re using iziExport intensively, you’ll probably be moving back and forth among the iziExport, Articles, and Tags panels quite frequently. It’s a good idea to create an InDesign workspace that arranges those three panels so that they’re all visible simultaneously.

Configuring the iziExport Panel

You’ve successfully connected iziExport to your WordPress site and selected an InDesign article for export. At this point you could just hit the Export button, and a new formatted WordPress draft post would appear on your blog, ready for you to review and publish. But if your WordPress site takes advantage of metadata, you’ll want to fill out the rest of the iziExport panel before you export (Figure 7).

The WP Categories section displays the categories that iziExport retrieved from your WordPress site, so select the ones you want. If you want to add or edit categories, you’ll have to do it on your WordPress site, and then reconnect so that iziExport has access to the latest list. In the WP Tags section, you can add the tags you’d normally enter in the WordPress post editor. The WP User Fields section is an advanced feature that’s useful if your WordPress site makes use of custom key/value metadata. If you defined custom InDesign tags (other than the ones that iziExport normally recognizes), you can use the ID Extra Tags section to tell iziExport how to handle those on export. The iziExport panel interface could benefit from being designed more like a step-by-step checklist; in its current form it’s too easy to forget to complete one of the prerequisites before clicking Export. It would also be helpful for iziExport to support presets that can remember multiple WordPress sites and iziExport panel configurations. You’ll probably want to make your own production checklist so that you remember to create and apply all of the necessary InDesign articles, tags, style mappings, and metadata, and enable the appropriate iziExport panel settings for your WordPress site. Unfortunately, at the moment there is not a lot of documentation for iziExport other than a FAQ and a set of tutorial videos on the iziExport website, but the developers plan to make more documentation available.

Exporting and Reviewing

When you click the Export button in the iziExport panel, you can monitor the progress bar and the Log section of the iziExport panel, and when it’s done, you can switch to the list of drafts on your WordPress site to see the draft that iziExport created. If you make corrections and export again, another draft is created, because iziExport doesn’t update existing drafts. Also, iziExport currently supports the WordPress post type, but not other types, such as page. It would be useful for at least the page type to be supported for legacy content that’s more reference-oriented and doesn’t need to appear as a blog post on a timeline. Once your draft is in WordPress, you can proceed as you normally would: review the draft, make corrections as needed, and then publish the post.

Be Prepared

Most of the work involved in using iziExport successfully is not within iziExport itself, and requires multiple skill sets. Preparing an InDesign document for iziExport will be relatively quick and straightforward if you’re already comfortable using InDesign to structure documents for EPUB or XML, and if you’re also familiar with WordPress document structure and metadata. The process will be moderately challenging if you have experience only with either EPUB (or XML) or WordPress but not both. If you don’t have much experience with EPUB, XML, or WordPress, you may find the workflow to be challenging, and it may take you some time and study to master it. If you plan to hire someone to help convert many InDesign documents into WordPress posts using iziExport, for best results you’ll want someone experienced with all of these areas: InDesign content types and styles, EPUB (or XML) conversions, and WordPress document structure. The support for mapping styles to tags can save a lot of time reformatting the document in WordPress, but only if the designer of the InDesign document used paragraph and character styles consistently. And you’ll find it easier to convert highly structured InDesign documents (such as technical documentation) than freeform, unstructured documents. For example, an energetic pop-culture magazine layout with a large number of unthreaded text frames, loose graphics, and little use of styles will require a relatively high investment in time spent applying tags and other structure so that everything translates well through iziExport to WordPress. (Though that would be true even without this plug-in!)

A Promising Shortcut from InDesign to WordPress

This first release of iziExport works best when you want to quickly convert some of your more useful InDesign documents into WordPress posts. Large-scale conversions of InDesign archives will be more of a challenge, due to the degree of careful manual preparation that’s required. Revolumedia has indicated that several of the limitations I encountered are already items they intend to address in future versions. Even though successful conversion depends on how meticulously you’ve structured your InDesign documents, the thoughtful ways that iziExport preserves InDesign text formatting and optimizes graphics still saves time over the additional steps that are required without this plug-in, and iziExport has a lot of potential to become even more useful.

Summary

ziExport plug-in iziexport.com $69.95, trial version available Mac and Windows, InDesign CC–CC 2015 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars