Syncing WordPress database with Airtable

[Grant_McNulty]

Hello,

I am new to Airtable but want to use it to inform my content strategy. This requires me to be able to replicate and update my WordPress website in Airtable.

I would like to:

• List item Create a record all of the current posts, their categories and status (draft, published etc.). I gather I can just export them as XML or CSV and import them into Airtable

• List item Update the Airtable table when the status of posts are change. E.g. if a post that has a draft status in WordPress is published, the status on the Airtable record should update to “Published”. Similarly, if the category is changed on Wordpress post, this should update and reflect on the Airtable record.

I understand that there are Zapier integrations that should be able to do this. I have tried a few but can’t get them to do what I want. I also understand that many people write content in Airtable, which then gets pushed to their website. I have a team that works on WordPress and part of the project is to train people on WordPress so I am not so keen on this approach.

Any input welcome.

Thanks,

Grant

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Grant_McNulty!

You can likely do this with either Integromat or Zapier, within the constraints of what they allow you to monitor & update.

I would HIGHLY recommend Integromat over Zapier, since both its Wordpress and Airtable integrations are MUCH deeper and MUCH more powerful and MUCH more flexible than Zapier.

In my opinion, Zapier should only be used as a last resort — if absolutely necessary for other reasons — when integrating with Airtable or Wordpress. Integromat can do soooo much more with both of those platforms.

However, there’s no “quick way” for me to guide you through the entire process in a forum post. It would take at least a few hours of setting it up, configuring the workflow of how you would want this to work for your needs, and testing it.

For example, a workflow would include deciding how you will match records between Wordpress and Airtable — the obvious way is matching by title, but what if a title changes and there’s no match? So you’d probably need at least 3 different workflows: new blog post, updated title of blog post, published blog post.

Creating an entire workflow takes some time to map out and then deploy.

You’d also need to work around any limitations of the integrations — for example, I don’t know off the top of my head if a newly-created draft post can trigger an automation, or if only newly-published posts can trigger automations, so you might need to use a schedule action or some other action to trigger automations instead.

Anyways, if you have a budget for this project, and you’d like to hire an absolute expert to help you create this integration, that’s exactly what I do for businesses. Feel free to send me a private message if you’d like to chat more. :slightly_smiling_face:

[kuovonne]

I can understand why you want a WordPress to Airtable workflow, even though I currently use a few different workflows in the opposite direction. (My custom block for creating posts in WordPress from Airtable records recently won a prize in Airtable’s custom block contest.)

I respectfully suggest that you use WordPress’s post ID to uniquely identify your posts and not the post title. Once a post is created, its post id never changes.

How often do changes happen to the WordPress website and how quickly do you need to see those changes?

[Grant_McNulty]

Hello and thanks for the tip on the post ID. Posts are published on a daily basis but it would work if the changes only reflected in Airtable every week or two as we have fortnightly content meetings.

The main thing I want to record is if a post status changes from draft/ pending to published so a workflow for that would suffice. Recording changes to categories and other things is secondary.

[kuovonne]

Thanks for the follow up.

Since you need to update the data in Airtable once a week or so, one option is to use an Airtable script. When you want to get the most recent data, click a button to run the script. The script gets the data (including post status and categories/tags) from the the WordPress API and updates the Airtable records.

However, this system requires setup on the WordPress site as well as custom code for the Airtable script. If you are interested in hiring someone to create such a script, let me know.

[Jorge_Rodriguez]

Congrats on the prize!! I gotta say I watched the video on your entry form and it looks solid. Just wondering, is the Post to WordPress block available already? Also, once the content has been published to WP is it possible to edit using tools like Thrive Architect?

[kuovonne]

@Jorge_Rodriguez Thank you. The Post to WordPress block as appears in the DevPost contests is freely available. You can see the link to the GitHub repository in the DevPost entry. I also have a updated version that I am working on. If you are interested in the block but do not feel up to remixing it from GitHub yourself, please feel free to direct message me.

Once the block pushes the post to WordPress, it exists just like any other post in WordPress. However, the contents of the post may or may not be editable using Thrive Architect. It all depends on the exact html that you push, and how Thrive Architect interprets it. Many WordPress page builders expect the html to be formed in a particular way, and do not play nicely with html that does not conform to their format.