The Shorthand WordPress plugin is free and available directly within wp-admin. It can also be manually downloaded from the WordPress Plugins Hub.

There are two options for installing the Shorthand plugin. Both will require that you have administrator rights for your Wordpress site.

Log in to your WordPress Dashboard and click “Plugins", then "Add New”:

Next, search for “Shorthand” in the top right search field. You should see a plugin with the author “Shorthand” and our Shorthand logo as the icon:

Press “Install Now”. You may need to wait a little while for it to complete.
Once that has finished, click “Activate”. This will refresh the page and your WordPress Admin will now have newer options from Shorthand.

First, download the Shorthand WordPress plugin to your computer. It will download as a .zip file.

Log in to your WordPress Dashboard and, as indicated in the image below, click:
"Plugins" (1), then
"Add New" (2), and
"Upload Plugin" (3) :

Then click:
"Choose file” (4, below), and select the .zip file that you previously downloaded.
Once that is done, press:
“Install Now” (5):

Finally, press “Activate” (6) next to the description of the Shorthand Plugin:
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After activating the plugin you will be presented with our first time setup, these steps help you connect your Shorthand workspace to your WordPress site.

If you're unsure if you need to fill anything in, we recommend leaving the field as default.

The first step involves inputting your API token/key. Once you have your API key to hand, simply follow the steps on the first prompt screen and add the relevant information to each step of the Setup Wizard:

Your permalink structure dictates the URL path at which your Shorthand stories will be found. This can usually be left with its default value which is as follows:

https://yourwebsite.com/shorthand_story/{STORY_NAME}

Note: If you wish to change this later, you will need to navigate to Settings > Shorthand and modify the Permalink there.

This optional step allows you to add custom CSS which is applied to all stories when published.
If you encounter any issues with story formatting after publishing, this may be due to, or could be fixed with, some custom CSS. Please contact support if you would like help with this.

Post processing allows modification of elements of stories dynamically using Regex and JSON.

This section is considered advanced and should be skipped/left as default. If you believe you should be using this section but aren't sure how, please contact our support team for assistance.
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Experimental features are addons that may impact the way the Shorthand plugin operates or impact other plugins. There are currently two experimental features which can be enabled:

1. Import Media Assets via Cron:

This setting will allow for WordPress sites with less memory to slowly pull assets from the story and upload them over time. This is particularly useful for websites on shared hosting.

This does, however, mean that upon importing a story to your WordPress site, the content will not load correctly until the cron is finished, which can vary in time.

2. Disable Advanced Custom Fields:

If you're using the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, you may find that the Custom Fields section of the Shorthand plugin will be missing from WordPress admin:

If this happens, the hidden fields should still be active and it shouldn't affect the story, but if you need to bring them back to edit them you can select the Disable Advanced Custom Fields checkbox.

Shorthand Stories are only available in Wordpress via the Shorthand plugin, and are not available under your default WordPress “Posts”. To import a story into a Shorthand WordPress Post, simply follow these steps:

Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and, as indicated in the image below, from the left side menu click:
“Shorthand" (1), then
"Add Shorthand Story” (2), then at the top of the resulting page, click
"Add Shorthand Story" (3):

Within the “Select Shorthand Story” box, you will now see the stories from your Shorthand dashboard. Selecting one of these stories will automatically populate the Custom Fields on the page:

Please note: Changing the Wordpress post title will not update the title of the story on the Shorthand platform.

Once you have selected the Shorthand story you wish to publish, click the “Publish” button in the right column:

Your story has now been published as a Shorthand WordPress story and will be viewable via “Shorthand > All Stories”:

After making changes to your Shorthand stories in the Shorthand platform, you will need to republish them on your WordPress website to show those changes. There are two routes to republishing which include manual republishing and bulk republishing.

Republishing your Shorthand story on WordPress will allow you to pull changes to the story made on the Shorthand platform to your WordPress website copy of the story.

Login to the WordPress dashboard and, as depicted in teh image below, from the left menu, select “Shorthand" (1), then "All Stories” (2) .
Click “Edit” on a story you wish to update, and after its details have loaded, click the “Update Shorthand Story” button (3) on the right hand side of the page.
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Note: Updating your Shorthand story takes some time as this downloads a fresh copy of the story from the Shorthand platform. The download speed is dependant on your current host,

Republishing multiple stories simultaneously will save some steps compared to publishing each individually.

Please note: The time required to republish multiple stories will depend on your current hosting provider.

To republish multiple stories at once, follow these steps:

Log in to the WordPress dashboard as an administrator, and as per the image below, from the left side menu, select “Shorthand" (1) then "All Stories” (2).

On the left hand side of each of your stories you will see a checkbox (circled in the image), select the checkbox of each of the stories you wish to update:
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Click the “Bulk actions” dropdown and select “Pull Story”:
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This will take the latest versions of the stories from Shorthand, and may take a few minutes to finish depending on your hosting provider and number and complexity of the stories.

Once this has finalized, you will see a success notice above the story list:

Any other errors should be raised with the Shorthand Support team.

During the Shorthand story pull process, users may experience an error due to limitations imposed by hosting providers that prevent long process execution times.

In order to remedy this it is recommended enabling the experimental Cron feature in the plugin settings:

This feature will offload the heavy media request to a CRON task which runs outside of the normal user flow. The story's assets won't be immediately available, but will be in a matter of minutes depending on story size.