Wordpress

Sync new articles to Wordpress

Byword's WordPress integration syncs all new articles in your account automatically to a WordPress site of your choosing. You can set it up and manage it here.

You can choose what status you'd like your posts to have in WordPress (e.g. if you want them to go live immediately, or be posted as a draft).

You can select an author.

And lastly, select whether you'd like your posts to go live with any tags or categories.

Scheduling

Further down, you'll have the ability to select between two scheduling modes. These modes affect how Byword sets the date field on posts that are sent to your site:

Publish articles immediately

This will send articles to your WordPress with no date field. Your site will set the date to the current time and date. If your Post Status set is set to Publish, this means the post will immediately be published and visible on your site.

Schedule articles to publish over time

With this option, you'll have the ability to set a maximum number of days (between 3 and 180) in the future that you'd like posts to be scheduled for. Byword will then randomly assign your post a publishing date and time based on this.

For example, let's say you set your maximum number of days to 30, and then generate 100 articles via the batch generator. Byword will give each of your posts a random publishing date between the current date and the date in 30 days' time. This should mean you have a little over 3 posts going out per day, on average, and can help smooth out content publishing volumes.

Note that:

• This also affects articles in the single article generator, where you may prefer immediate publishing (so keep this in mind).

• When using this scheduling mode, Byword will schedule all posts at least 24 hours in advance (i.e. none of your posts in the example above will publish within 24 hours of generation).

• This is best used with Post Status set to Publish. This won't immediately publish your posts, but will ensure that they are published at the randomly assigned future date. Using other post statuses won't have this effect.

Beta: Pages mode

We've just launched a beta that allows you to create pages via the WordPress integration. You can do so by changing the following setting at the top of the integration page:

Once you've switched to pages mode, you may notice different configuration options:

Parent page

This is an optional setting which allows you set a parent page for your articles. There is an optional search bar to help filtering, in cases where your site has a large number of possible parent pages.

Page Template

This defines what template you'd like applied to new pages, and comes from your theme settings

When using the pages mode integration for the first time, it's highly recommended to check that the options here line up with the template options you see when you create a new page on your WordPress site (https://{yoursitedomain}/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=page).

In certain themes, templates will appear in the Byword dropdown which won't appear when you try to select a template in the page creator. Selecting these templates in Byword may cause errors with the integration.

My WordPress integration isn't working

The large majority of issues concerning Byword's WordPress integration are down to either settings on the site's server/hosting, or security plugins that have been installed on the site.

Unfortunately it's difficult to debug these issues in the abstract, but it's recommended to:

• Check/ask your developer whether there might be anything in place regarding your hosting that would prevent Byword from accessing your site's WordPress REST API.

• Review your security plugins, possibly disabling any that might prevent external services from sending requests to your site via the REST API.

Some more specific issues that are routinely seen are:

• When I try to integrate, I'm taken to a 404 page This typically happens because Byword has guessed at your site's URL structure, and gotten it wrong. This could be because you have a custom /wp-admin/ URL structure in place. It's not currently possible to integrate in these scenarios.

• I see a message about application passwords being disallowed This typically happens because you have a plugin or some other measure in place blocking you from issuing application passwords. To get around this, you'll either have to remove that plugin (usually Wordfence) or configure it to allow application passwords.

The Batch Generator, and cached settings

If you have a WordPress integration set up, you'll notice an option on the Batch Generator page that looks like this:

The setting above reflects Byword's default behaviour: as soon as each article has finished writing, Byword will check your WordPress integration settings at that moment in time, and use those to sync the article to your WordPress.

The benefit of this is that it allows you to change your WordPress integration settings while your articles are generating, if needs be. That said, this behaviour can be limiting in certain circumstances, particularly in situations where you want to queue up a large number of projects with different integration settings (which by default would require you to wait until each project had finished before changing the settings).

The dropdown shown above allows you to override this behaviour, and to cache (i.e. save a snapshot of) your integration settings at the time a project is sent to a batch generator. To enable this, simply select the Yes... option in the dropdown:

With this option enabled, you can queue up multiple projects with different WordPress integration settings. Simply set up the integration for your first project, create it in the batch generator, change the settings as required, create the next project in the batch generator, and so on...

Some important points to note are that:

• During the launch of this feature, it will remain off by default, so you'll need to enable it in the batch generator.

• This feature allows you to change the entire integration between runs, meaning you can switch between sites/domains if you so choose.

• Do bear in mind that the nature of the feature will mean that integration settings can't be changed once the project is created.

Manual syncs

You can manually sync articles from Byword to your WordPress site. You can do this in two different ways:

• Syncing one or more single articles To do this, head to My Articles, select the articles you'd like to sync, and press the Sync to Site button above the articles table.

• Syncing a project Head to any project page inside of My Articles, and select the Wordpress button at the top of the page (this may appear as Sync to Site if you have mutliple integrations enabled). Note that this will sync the entire project.

In order to use either of these methods, you'll have to have already set up a WordPress integration.

Do bear in mind that there is no way to pause or cancel a manual sync once started, and that the sync should take between 1 and 2 seconds per article.