Creative Ways to Use Create

three female bloggers looking at a smartphone and a laptop together on a couch

This week, we’re celebrating 1,000 downloads of the Create by Mediavine® WordPress plugin!

Our team has been working around the clock to dream up and, well, create new features for our flagship plugin, and we’re so excited to see all the ways you are using it already!

A Create by Mediavine GIF.

Create is a plugin which does a lot of stuff. It helps users produce content that…

  • Provides structured data to search engines
  • Creates additional opportunities for ad placement and affiliate links
  • Engages readers through a beautifully-designed card layout

A woman vlogging, holding a bouquet of flowers.

At the moment we support three different types of content, with more planned for the future. These content types are Recipes, How-Tos and our newest type, Lists. Hopefully, the applications for these content types are apparent.

However, there are some decidedly non-obvious ways to use Create that our amazing publishers have found. The purpose of this blog post is to highlight some of the more creative ways that our publishers have found to use Create.

Homemade dog treats

Non-Food Recipes

As the token vegetarian member of the Publisher Engineering team, my coworkers often rib* on me for not eating real food. But I draw the line somewhere, even if that “somewhere” is past a rack made of tofu – I’m not going to eat soap, or goo, or dog food.

But if you’re making these items, you’re still going to have ingredients and instructions and prep time and….hey, these sound a lot like something we could use Recipes for.

Yep – there’s nothing stopping you from using Create for non-food items. In fact, we encourage it! If you’re working on an instruct-able guide with ingredients and you want to display it in a beautifully-designed card, Recipes are perfect for you.

Non-Food Recipes

One word of caution: If you’re using a Recipe card for items not intended for human consumption, you need to disable JSON-LD output by unchecking the “use schema” button in the “SEO/Social” section of the card editor. Search engines will punish you for including this data for non-food recipes. Don’t worry – they’ll still be able to index your guide because of the card markup.

Of course, this opens up a philosophical discussion on what makes food food and non-food non-food, but that’s a subject for another blog post and – I’m getting a message in my earpiece from our marketing team – another blog altogether.

* This pun is an accident and I’m 80% sure my team is being good-natured when they make fun of me.


A woman vlogging a DIY, holding a jig saw.

How To Do…Anything

As a coder, I like to make the joke that I work with my hands. It’s usually good for a laugh*, because in actuality my hands are as pristine as David Duchovny in Zoolander’s. However, my resolution for this year is to be more competent around the house. Thankfully my job requires me to read through a ton of DIY blogs and I’ve picked up loads of useful tips and awesome project ideas just from reading the How-To cards I’ve helped publishers with.

Because the term “How-To” has a connotation of craftiness and DIY spirit, it might not be obvious how open-ended the applications for How-To cards are. You can use them for literally any and every type of guide that has instructions.

Awesome Uses of How-Tos

Although guides do support lists of materials and tools needed for a project, neither field is required. If you want to publish something with one or neither field, that’s totally fine! We’re currently working on some cool features around making the instructions field more powerful, and we can’t wait to share more in the coming weeks and months.

* I said hopefully and dishonestly.


A woman blogging.

Lists

In Version 1.3, we released Lists, our first new content type since launch. Lists allow publishers to curate a series of gorgeously laid-out links. The links can be internal – linking to posts or Create cards within your site – or external – linking to pages on other sites. (In fact, this post is made using Lists!)

Unlike Recipes and How-tos, which have a ton of obvious uses and some non-obvious ones, Lists are proving to have seemingly endless applications. We intentionally didn’t want to prescribe a use case for Lists. It’s an open-ended feature with possibilities that we want our users to explore, and – based on feedback so far – it looks like y’all are most certainly doing that.

Since we launched Lists at the end of January, we’ve already been blown away by the amazing ideas that our publishers have already come up with.

A List...of Lists

We want to hear feedback on what our publishers want to use Lists for. If there’s an idea you have, please let us know! We’re actively working on tailoring this feature to fit more use cases and we want to hear what use cases you have.


Let us know what you’re making!

We’re always interested in learning more about the amazing, creative ways that our publishers are using Create. If you want to share your content and see what other publishers are making, we have a Facebook group for that exact purpose! And if you have questions about getting started with Create, we’ve love to speak with you at create@mediavine.com.

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