How To Share A Post Draft In WordPress

If you’re collaborating with someone to write a post, it’s often useful to show it to them for a final check before publishing it. Unfortunately, there’s no way to share a post draft in WordPress with a stranger. Instead, you have to create an account for them, send the verification mail, and go through this process for each user. Never mind the inconvenience, you probably don’t want the security implications of having accounts for so many people on your WordPress site.

So what’s the alternative? In this article, I’ll share two plugins – one by Automattic and the other by an independent 3rd party provider. Long story short, despite having poorer reviews, the one by Automattic is better.

1. “Share a Draft” Plugin by Automattic

Originally written by Nikolay Bachiyski, the Share a Draft plugin is now part of Automattic’s plugin repository, along with Jetpack and the others. I can only assume that Automattic purchased it from Nikolay because it’s such a common feature, and the plugin has some amazing perks. Using it, you can:

1. Create a public URL for a draft
2. Specify the lifetime during which the draft will be available to view
3. Extend or delete the public URLs for all your shared drafts from a central location

To use it, download and install the Share a Draft plugin, and then access it from the “Posts” menu as shown here:

The screenshot shows a drop-down box of all the drafts currently sitting in your posts queue. Select one from the list, and then choose for how long you want others to be able to access it. By default, it’s 2 weeks, but you can set the limit as low as one minute.

Once you click the “Share it” button, the entry will be added to the list as shown here:

I’ve shared the URL for just one minute in this test example. You can also immediately extend or delete the URL by clicking the links on the right-hand side. This makes managing your shared draft URLs very easy. And when the time is up, you get a 404 error if you try and access it, as shown here:

I like the Share a Draft plugin because it works so well, and you can easily keep track of all the URLs.

2. Public Post Preview Plugin

The Public Post Preview plugin is the creation of an independent developer, and it has much better reviews than the “Share a Draft” plugin. However, I don’t think it’s as good as the first one, even though it arguably has a more seamless way of generating a public preview of a draft.

To use it, install the Public Post Preview plugin and create a draft in your editor. On the right-hand side, you should see a checkmark that automatically generates a public URL for the current draft, as shown here:

This public URL can be accessed from any spot. Here’s a screenshot of an incognito window on Firefox showing the draft, meaning that anyone with the right URL can view it, and they don’t have to be signed in:

To remove the link, you need to uncheck the box.

Automattic’s Plugin is Better

Despite having worse reviews and fewer installations, I feel that Automattic’s “Share a Draft” plugin is superior to Public Post Preview. The reason is that “Share a Draft” lets you manage all your URLs from a centralized location, so you can keep track of which URLs you’ve shared. Even more importantly, you can specify a time limit for how long you want the public URL to exist and extend or delete the timeframe for all posts on a single screen. The centralized management and the expiration options make the first plugin better than the second for sharing a draft on WordPress.