WordPress Publishing Automation With Python

The SEO community started to automate the boring stuff using Python and node JS in the last two years. Automation can save you hundreds of hours of manual work, and sometimes it can be more accurate than humans work.

This tutorial will talk about automating one of the most boring tasks in our daily work, uploading content to WordPress.

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS globally, and you can use it almost for everything from a news website, eCommerce, and personal blogs. I decided to find a way to automate uploading content to WordPress, and I have built three websites using this method.

The first one is Arab Crypto Cap. It's a website that provides prices for Crypto Currency in Arabic using Coin Gecko API.

The second one was for experimental purposes. I scraped the content from Healthline.com and published it.

The third website is for providing nutrition facts about food. I gathered the data from different sources and published them with images using Pexesl API.

You can use this method to automate publishing content on WordPress if you have one of the below cases

• Aggregating content from APIs 
• Connect your WordPress website without mobile apps or other backend services
• Translating content from other resources
• Just having fun and learning new things

Automate Publishing Content on WordPress Using Rest API

WordPress REST API is an application programming interface that can connect your WordPress website with other applications that allow you to interact with the WordPress core without touching the CMS. The most powerful thing here is that you can get the benefits of all WordPress core and plugins to connect it with other applications.

Tasks You Can Achieve With WordPress REST API

• Add/edit/delete content (Posts, Pages, Categories)
• Add/edit/delete users
• Create WordPress plugins

And many other things you can achieve using REST API. You only need an idea and data, and then you can automate your work using this method.

WordPress REST API & Python

In this tutorial, we will use Python to publish content on our WordPress website with the help of REST API. It is very easy to use them to achieve many things and publish thousands of pages in hours.

Before we start, make sure to have

• WordPress installation preferred to be on your local machine for testing
• Python installed on your machine
• Jupyter Notebook or any other IDE
• Dummy Data, like scrapped articles or auto-generated Lorem Ipsum text.

WordPress Plugins

For this tutorial, we need only one plugin that allows our Python application to connect to our WordPress website using REST API. This plugin is called Application Password. You can download it for free and install it on your website.

In WordPress 5.6, this plugin has been migrated with the core. You can download this plugin only from your WordPress plugins page, and you won't find it on wordpress.org. You can follow this guide to use the core feature.

After installing the plugin, go to the Edit Profile page, and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will find a new field and button, add a name for your application and click on create a password.

After clicking on Add New, a pop-up will appear with your application password, and this password will be used in our Python application.

Python Libraries to Automate WordPress Publishing

make sure to install the below Python libraries on your machine

• Pandas to read the data
• base64 to encode the password
• requests to perform requests on REST API
• tqdm to check the progress of the tasks
• JSON to read the JSON response from REST API

import pandas as pd
import base64
import requests
from tqdm.notebook import tqdm
import json

To test the REST API on your WordPress website, go to this link, and you will see a JSON response on your browser.

http://localhost/wordpress_local/wp-json/wp/v2

Change localhost/wordpress_local with your website name, for example:

https://www.example.com/wp-json/wp/v2

Then in our Python application, we need to define a user and password, and link.

user = 'admin'
password = 'Cd4n 9jBk w9Bn hFoj yFDR Qchw'
url = 'http://localhost/wordpress_local/wp-json/wp/v2'

Encode the connection of your WordPress website

wp_connection = user + ':' + password
token = base64.b64encode(wp_connection.encode())

Prepare the header of our request

headers = {'Authorization': 'Basic ' + token.decode('utf-8')}

Define a title for our first post

post_title = "This is my first post using Python and REST API"

Define a body for our post

post_body = "This is the body content of my first post and i am very happy"

Then we need to set the type of our post and assign the content values to it using a Python dictionary

    post = {'title': post_title,
            'status': 'publish',
            'content': post_body,
            'author': '1',
            'format': 'standard'
            }

Finally, we will perform the request on the REST API to insert the post.

wp_request = requests.post(url + '/posts', headers=headers, json=post)

Now go to your WordPress posts list, and you should see your first post published.

I am sure that you are happy now, and the ideas started rushing in your mind to create websites and automate your work.

Now we will create more posts and assign them to categories, and upload images. But before that, let's install some of the most popular WordPress Plugins and see how the REST API and the WordPress core will interact with each other.

We will install the below plugins and use them later in our next project:

• Yoast
• EWWW Images

Experimental Project

Now we will build a project to experiment with many things using Python and WordPress. Our project will be about my country Jordan that will include articles about places and food dishes.

Our plan will be:

• Create categories manually on WordPress
• Extract the IDs of the categories from the Database
• Set up a content plan
• Get the content from Wikipedia
• Translate the content to any language you want
• Get free high-quality images from Pexels
• Upload the content automatically on WordPress

Adding Categories to WordPress

Here we will add three categories manually to our WordPress website and will call them:

• Cities
• Attractions
• Food

Extract Categories IDs from the Database

In case you have many categories on our website, you can get the IDs of the categories directly from the database to use in our Python script by performing the below queries

use wordpress_local;
show tables;
describe wp_terms;
select term_id,name from wp_terms;

And then extract them in a CSV format.

Set up a Content Plan

We will open a Google sheet and add three columns to add titles for our content and assign categories for them.

Now export the Google sheet to a CSV file to use in our Python script.

Get Content From Wikipedia Using Python

Now we will use Wikipedia API to get content about our topics. I will leave you with a tutorial from our friend Jean Christophe Chouinard. he has a whole article about Wikipedia API and its use.

Read and display our data in Pandas data frame

Define a function to get the data from Wikipedia

def get_wiki(title):
    subject = title
    url = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php'
    params = {
            'action': 'query',
            'format': 'json',
            'titles': subject,
            'prop': 'extracts',
            'exintro': True,
            'explaintext': True,
        }

    response = requests.get(url, params=params)
    data = response.json()

    page = next(iter(data['query']['pages'].values()))
    try:
        return page["extract"]
    except:
        return "No Wiki Data"

Loop over the titles and pass them to the Wikipedia function

data["Wikipedia English Description"] = data["Title"].apply(lambda title : get_wiki(title))

And now we have our data from the Wikipedia API. The next step is to translate the content and the titles to Spanish

from deep_translator import GoogleTranslator

def translate_content(original_text,language):
    translated_content = GoogleTranslator(source='auto', target=language).translate(original_text) 
    return translated_content

data["Spanish Title"] = data["Title"].apply(lambda title : translate_content(title,"es"))
data["Spanish Wikipedia Description"] = data["Wikipedia English Description"].apply(lambda description : translate_content(description,"es"))

Now we have the original content and the translated in the same data frame

Get Free High-quality Images Using Python

Now it's time to get free high-quality images from Pexels API. It is a website that provides free high-quality images that you can use in your website without attribution to the owner.

Sign up on their website and get an API key. It is free and easy to use.

We will use our English titles to get images from the API, and sometimes you can't find the images you want. The API will return the most relevant images to your keyword.

In the API request, we will pass our category and title so that the API can get us images from the most relevant category.

Step to get images from Pexels API

• Request the image from the API
• Get image URL form Pexels
• Download the image locally
• Change the quality of the image

Request the image from Pexels API

def get_pixabay_image(row):
    item_name = row["Title"].replace(" ","+")
    category = row["Category Name"]
    url = f"https://pixabay.com/api/?key=xxxxxxxxxxx&q={item_name}&image_type=photo&orientation=all&category={category}&safesearch=true&order=popular&per_page=3"
    page = requests.get(url)
    json_data = page.json()
    try:
        image_url = json_data["hits"][0]["largeImageURL"]
        return image_url
    except:
        return "No Image"

data["Pixels Image URL"] = data.apply(lambda row: get_pixabay_image(row), axis=1)

Now we have the image's URLs from Pexels website

Now we will download the images on our machine and optimize the quality to 70% to reduce the file size.
Create a new folder where your script is placed and name it images. inside it, create two other folders for optimizing the images and call them big and small

from PIL import Image

def download_image(row):
    # Download Image
    response = requests.get(row["Pixels Image URL"])
    image_name = row["Spanish Title"].lower().replace(" ","-")
    file = open(f"images/big/{image_name}.jpg", "wb")
    file.write(response.content)
    file.close()
    # Convert Image Quality
    image_file = Image.open(f"images/big/{image_name}.jpg")
    image_file = image_file.convert('RGB')
    image_file.save(f"images/small/{image_name}.jpg", quality=70)

def generate_images(row):
    if row["Pixels Image URL"] != "No Image":
        download_image(row)
        return row["Spanish Title"].lower().replace(" ","-") + ".jpg"
    else:
        return "No Image"

data["Local Image Path"] = data.apply(lambda row : generate_images(row), axis=1)

Results

Images

Upload the Content on WordPress

Now we are ready to upload the content on WordPress. We have the translated content and the optimized images.

def wp_insert(post_title, post_content, category, image_path):
    media = {
        'file': open("images/small/" + image_path,'rb'),
        }

    image = requests.post(url + '/media', headers = headers, files = media)

    imageID = str(json.loads(image.content)['id'])

    post = {'title': post_title,
            'status': 'publish',
            'content': post_content,
            'categories': category,
            'featured_media': imageID,
            'author': '1',
            'format': 'standard'
            }

    wp_insert_request = requests.post(url + '/posts', headers=headers, json=post)

for index, row in tqdm(data.iterrows()):
    wp_insert(row["Spanish Title"], row["Spanish Wikipedia Description"], row["Category ID"], row["Local Image Path"])
print("Done")

And now you have all your posts on your website published with optimized images using the downloaded image optimization plugin.

Homepage content

You can find the complete script in this Google Colab Notebook

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on my Linkedin Profile.