The automation tab of RealVMS is a tool which enables you to automatically make posts to your website over a specific period of time. The number of posts which get added to your site each time the automation runs is completely up to you.
Lets take a quick look at the screenshot below which displays the automation settings.
There are two main parts to the automation of RealVMS, the first part is setting up some information about the type of post or posts you would like to have automatically placed on your website.
Under the heading “Automation Setup” you will see a series of options available to you. The first option you will notice is called “Keyword” which has an input field next to it.
This is where you would enter in a keyword for the type of post you would like to have added to your website, for instance lets say I wanted to add music videos of the singer “Michelle Branch”, in this case the keyword I’ll enter into the text field would be “Michelle Branch”.
The next item in the form you’ll notice is the “YouTube Category”, its wise to try and choose a category which best suites the topic of your keyword, so for instance “Michelle Branch” is a singer so I would assume the best category to find the videos under would be “Music”
Next you will see an option called “Sort By” and this option just enables you to order the results a little better, most of the time this value is best left untouched until you get used to the plugin
The next option is called “Select Category” and this option will hold the values of all the categories you currently have setup in your own Wordpress installation, the more categories you add in Wordpress means the more categories that you will be able to select in this drop down menu.
Its a good idea to keep your website or blog organized so you don’t waste time in the future, in my case I would setup a category called “Music Videos” Or one called “Michelle Branch” and then select it from this drop down list, that way when this post gets added to my site it will automatically be placed under the category I select here
Next we have an input box called “Post Tags” which enables you to manually enter in a bunch of tags you would like to have associated with your posts, however you should note that if you select the option below called “Use Video Tags?” the values you enter here will not be used.
You should only enter tags in this box if you do not want to use the tags already associated with the Youtube video that will be added to your site, sometimes you may not want to use the Youtube video tags, in which case you can manually enter your own tags here.
The next option is called the “Comment Range” which is the range of comments you would like to have added to your post, so for instance lets say that I wanted to have 50 or less comments automatically added to this post when it gets added to my website, in this case I would enter in a low value of 20 and in the next box I would enter in the max value of 50.
The first box of the comment range is the lowest number of comments you would like to have added to this post and the next input box is the highest number of comments you would like added to your post.
You should note that if you want between 30 and 50 comments added to your website there is a chance that you will end up with less then 30 comments if the Youtube video being added to your site does not have between 30 and 50 comments, but it will never add more then 50 comments (Or whichever numbers you enter in) to this post.
The next three checkboxes are pretty straight forward, the first one is called “Use Safe Commenting?” and if checked it will simply remove any possible swear words from the comments before they get added to your website.
The next option which we talked about before is called “Use Video Tags?” and if this option is selected the tags which gets added to this post will be the ones from the Youtube video.
The next option is called “Use Video Descriptions?” and you can select this option if you wish to include the video description associated with the Youtube video, if you do no select this option then no description will be given to your post.
The last two checkbox options are for the social bookmarking feature included with RealVMS, and if you select them then a bookmark (Link) to your post will automatically be added to your Del.icio.ous and/or Faves account.
You should note that in order for the social bookmarking feature to work during the automation process you must enter in your username and password for these accounts under the “Social Bookmarks” tab in RealVMS, if you select both these options without adding your username and password information then your posts will not get added to these services.
Once you have filled out the form you can press the “Add Post Details” button at the bottom of the page and when you do so you’ll see your entry in the sidebar on the right hand side of the screen. You will also see two buttons beside your newly created option, one is called “Remove” and one is called “Edit”, if you click the remove button then this entry will simply be removed or if you made a mistake or would like to change something in the future you can come back and click the edit button and make any required changes.
At this point you are able to setup as many entries as you would like, but we suggest you don’t add any more then 10 entries, you have to remember that for each entry you add in these steps will equal to one post added to your website each time the automation process is run. So if you add 10 entries to this section then each time the automation process is run 10 posts will be added to your website.
Now that we have taken the time to setup any entries we want to automatically add to our website we are now able to now start the automation process.
The top section of this page is called “Automation Settings” and it shows you information about any current automation you have setup, there are only two options to choose at this stage, the first option is to choose a value of hourly or daily. These values mean that the automation process will run once an hour or once per day.
The next setting is so you can choose when you would like the automation to start, so if you would like to start the automation process immediately you won’t have to change these settings but if you would like it to start tomorrow then you would simply choose tomorrow’s date.
If we were to choose an hourly automation and we have setup 10 entries under the “Automation Setup” stage this would mean that every hour 10 new posts will be added to our website.
