Best WordPress Modifications: Article2pdf
Say you want to offer your website content as a downloadable PDFs. A typical process for this might include:
- Copy and paste all of your content into a Word document
- Export as PDF
- Upload to your website
- Modify page to include link to PDF
It seems simple enough, but one can quickly see the drawbacks of using this manual method (ex. possible errors at all stages, can’t upgrade look of documents without recreating each individually, far too many steps to be doing on a regular basis…).
FPDF
However, if you’re using a content management system you can very easily automate the entire process. The key is to use a PDF creation library such as FPDF. This free library (the F in FPDF stands for “free”) is easy to use and allows you to create standard PDF documents using nothing more than a few lines of PHP.
Article2pdf
If you’re using WordPress the process is even simpler. Article2pdf is a free plugin from Marc Schieferdecker that utilizes the FPDF library. The installation process is like all other WordPress plugins, and it comes with several configuration options and good documentation.
To use Article2pdf, you simply create a template PDF that serves as the basis for all of your PDFs to be generated. The plugin does the rest of the work in adding the content to your template design. With the ability to create template files, I’ve found that I can control nearly everything about the look of the PDFs that I need to. Of the few things I’ve changed within the plugin code itselft, all were cosmetic details that bugged me as a designer–I could have lived without making any changes if I was willing to accept a slightly less refined look in the end.
So quit manually generating PDFs for everything on your website–with FPDF and Article2pdf you can completely automate the process and use the hours saved to generate more great content for your users!
