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Free Plugin by Scott Reilly v2.6

Stealth Publish

Prevent specified posts from being featured on the front page or in feeds, and from notifying external services of publication.

Stealth Publish

The facts

Rating
5★ from 11
Active installs
900+
Price
Free
Last updated
13 Apr 2016
Added
Sep 2010
Requires WP
3.6
Tested up to
WP 4.5.33
Downloads
30,868

Our analysis

AI-assisted

Stealth Publish is a WordPress plugin that allows you to publish posts without them appearing on the front page or in feeds. This is useful for adding content quietly to your site, as it prevents notifications to external services about the publication.

The plugin adds a checkbox to the post editor, enabling you to mark posts as 'stealth published'. Once marked, these posts will not show in standard queries for recent posts, although they may still appear if other plugins query the database differently. It includes filters for customization.

Best for: This plugin suits users who want to publish content discreetly without public notification.

What it does well

  • Prevents posts from appearing on the front page
  • Stops notifications to external services
  • Checkbox for easy stealth publishing
  • Records stealth publish status for future edits

Where it falls short

  • Limited information on compatibility with other plugins
  • Last updated in April 2016

Verdict

Stealth Publish offers a straightforward solution for quietly adding posts to your WordPress site. However, its last update was several years ago, which may raise concerns about ongoing support.

From the developer

Scott Reilly's own description of Stealth Publish, lightly tidied.

This plugin allows you to prevent specified posts from being featured on the front page or in feeds, and from notifying external services of publication. Beneficial in instances where you want to publish new content without any fanfare and just want the post added to archive and category pages and its own permalink page.

A “Stealth publish?” checkbox is added to the “Write Post” admin page. Posts which are saved with that checkbox checked will no longer be featured on the front page of the blog, nor will the post be included in any feeds.

A stealth published post will also not notify any external services about the publication. This includes not sending out pingbacks, trackbacks, and pings to update services such as pingomatic.com. This behavior can be overridden via the ‘c2c_stealth_publish_silent’ filter (see Filters section).

NOTES:

  • Use of other plugins making their own queries against the database to find posts will possibly allow a post to appear on the front page. But use of the standard WordPress functions for retrieving posts (as done for the main posts query and the recent posts widget) should not allow stealth published posts to appear on the home page.

  • If you use this plugin, you do not need to use my Silent Publish plugin as that functionality is incorporated into this plugin. Alternatively, if you like the silent publishing feature but want your new posts to appear on your blog’s front page and in feeds, then just use the “Silent Publish” plugin.

  • The plugin records when a post is stealth published, so subsequent edits of the post will have the “Stealth publish?” checkbox checked by default.

Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | Author Homepage

Filters

The plugin is further customizable via three filters. Typically, these customizations would be put into your active theme’s functions.php file, or used by another plugin.

c2c_stealth_publish_meta_key (filter)

The ‘c2c_stealth_publish_meta_key’ filter allows you to override the name of the custom field key used by the plugin to store a post’s stealth publish status. This isn’t a common need.

Arguments:

  • $custom_field_key (string): The custom field key to be used by the plugin. By default this is ‘_stealth-publish’.

Example:

/**
 * Defines a custom meta key to be used by Stealth Publish.
 *
 * @param string $custom_field_key The default custom field key name.
 * @return string
 */
function override_stealth_publish_key( $custom_field_key ) {
    return '_my_custom_stealth-publish';
}
add_filter( 'c2c_stealth_publish_meta_key', 'override_stealth_publish_key' );

c2c_stealth_publish_silent (filter)

The ‘c2c_stealth_publish_silent’ filter allows you to override whether the plugin also ensure the post gets published silently (i.e. without sending out pingbacks, tracbacks, and pings to update services).

Read the full description on the official page →

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