This scenario allows your to automatically post new (templated) Wordpress pages for your blog, podcast, or any other RSS feed, using Make.com and fairly basic html.


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Transcript

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Hey everyone today, we're gonna talk about a kind of nifty scenario that we've created for a client. And so the use case is automatically posting blog posts on WordPress when your blog is actually hosted somewhere else. So what we're doing is we're grabbing updates. The RSSV whenever they happen. We're getting the episode code.

We're creating the post on WordPress. We're getting the metadata and then we're actually populating the post with raw HTML, which is kind of cool. And for those of you a bit more technical it's okay. Nothing like react native sorry, react. But there's a bit of a principle in there in terms of how we're serving things up.

That is similar at. As far as I can tell. So with that, let's jump in. So the way this works is the podcast is set up on simple cast. And so we have the RSS feed here right now. I've got it at maximum five returned items. Now we're expecting about an episode per week. So right now that's all just for testing and then we're able to schedule with whatever frequency we want.

I'm pretty sure there's a way to do this. Actually set up with a web. Though I'm not a hundred percent certain. So if anyone knows how to do that, I would love for you guys to reach out and tell me, okay. So after we get the RSS feed items, then what we're doing is taking out the episode code. So here let's do a run, just so that this has some meaningful data in it.

And so what we can see here is in the, oh yeah, we're running all five. Huh? We don't need that. Okay. So we can see the data that was returned in bundle. Number one over here is. Okay. So, you know, ID the title and, you know, basically the things you would expect, right? The authors, we have the date. And then if we dig in, we have a few other useful things like the actual ID of the, you know, of the podcast right now, what's happening is on the page.

We are here. Let's take a look at what the page looks like very quickly here, so you can kind of see what we're building. So if we take a look at the preview,

Who we have the heading, we have this video player and because this isn't embed, we have to change just the episode that it's pointing to for each new page. These are static links. And then the summary is dynamically populated and then followed by this Clavio form, which is another embed served up via clavia.

Now with that context, let's pop back in. So figuring out how to point the, the podcast player was a little bit of a challenge. And let's see if we just go in here and inspect and take a look at how it's built because we're definitely using a few HTML skills in here and the little bit of web dev. So you can see over here, we have the source URL and actually though the way that we are writing the code, isn't exactly like that.

So if I show you and this may not.  the most wonderful view of it because make doesn't really have a full code editor. Right. So I know I'm jumping around, but just bear with me, cuz I want to kind of build up these concepts in a logical order. And so if we take a look at, just write down, we have the player dot simple cast.com/text.

And as you see that text as the result of number two, we also put dark mode false, which makes me sad. It wouldn't match the website. So, you know, we have to live and these other properties are, I mean, really specific to simple cast and all in their documentation. So I won't spend too much time on that.

Now what we actually have to extract, I'm gonna show you it's a little bit complicated and I think I will just paste this for you, even though you'll have to change the variables. I'll paste the code for you in the, in the YouTube comments. So what we have here is we're removing the first part of the URL.

So we have substring. Where we're removing what is in the URL and we're removing everything that is in between. Index of this string. So basically the beginning of this string, which is, or, sorry, the end of this string, which is the episode is where we're starting from. So, because I wanted to match it, well, this looks a little weird, but because I didn't wanna, you know, if I put in a slash we may not know exactly which slash we're starting from, but this is the episode, sorry, this is the podcast code that proceeds the episode code.

And so this is never gonna change. And so I just put in the last six digits, including the slash, and then I did plus. So I'm just making sure that we're not gonna grab the wrong location and then I'm, you know, moving us forward to the end of the slash. So we want everything that comes after this slash now maybe it would be a bit useful to hear enclosures URL, just to show you again, what we're dealing with.

So when we look in here, we have this URL, so we have slash audio, and then this is the podcast ID. So you can see this string that I grabbed from the end. So then after that it's episodes, and then we have the episode URL and then we have some other stuff. So we're just trying to isolate this guy, taking a look.

So we start, you know, at the end of right before slash episodes, and then we're going up to wherever the location of.mp. So basically what is needed in this particular URL. And it took like a little bit of experimentation to figure out it was a little bit irritating, but not, not horrible. So just looking again, what we need is everything before dot MP3 and everything.

After the podcast itself. So that's what we manage to grab in the section over here. You could actually build this into the ad post content because that's where we're plugging it in. The reason that I don't is one for legibility. And two, when you're actually debugging, it's so much easier to use a composer string module or set a variable module to test because you can run this module only over and over again, and keep seeing the value that you're getting.

So it really speeds up the development process. So whenever you're doing a complicated function like that, even if you will. Plug it in ultimately into another module. I really strongly recommend developing it in a variable. So it's a nice little container. So what happens next? You'd think this could all happen in one step and technically it kind of could, but I, I had a weird sort of dependency thing that you'll, you'll see as we go.

So what happens? We create this post. We know the title. We. The description. We know the date created, although it doesn't really respect that. So, well, we know the slug, which is the title in this case. And you know, this, I'm still working on to get the date recorded, to show up. So we know all these things we know, you know, so this is easy all to plug in, but there are some things that we're only gonna get afterwards.

So what we're doing is, you know, when we do the step it's going to, of course return the ID. So then once we get the, I. We are just getting back information about the post, including its own permalink and its own metadata. As it's been posted on WordPress, then we go in here. So we start now actually creating the body, right?

So this is all the HTML that's gonna be injected. So one, we needed that post idea, of course, for this module which we actually were able to get over. And then if we take a look, as we go through, this is the field that we got in the second one. So I just wanna move that over if I can. Hmm. Swear. You could do that.

No. Well, we'll just close it, but what we're getting back here is. Permalink template. So basically that's just for knowing where it's actually posted on the same site. And we use that for some of the internal references of the site. So in this case, in this case, you can see over here that we have our SS feed.

What was this? This is a link to, oh, play it in a new window. That's what it was. So in order to play it in a new window, we have to. Where to direct people to. Right. And so that's where we're kind of doing the self-referential thing. And as far as I can tell, that was the only reason I had to go through the step of creating the post, getting the data and then updating it.

And we could yeah, because I didn't want to play around with having to edit the body afterwards. I just did the whole body in this later section, rather than making the update to inject. Which potentially could be done. So you're seeing a lot of code, which you can tell if you know, a little bit about WordPress.

I have copy pasted this directly from WordPress, because this is still a pretty early version. And so what I wanna show you is, you know, let's say this was the page I was trying to copy because it's exactly what I did. I started with a page just like this one. And instead of writing all this in HTML manually, a lot of you.

There's a shortcut where you go and you just inspect it. And you, you find where it lives, get the highest kind level item of it, right. Click edit as HTML and then boom copy. And that's it. You can just paste it right into make.com and you have the HTML written. And so that's why I have this WordPress style divs inside of divs, inside of divs, which is a little bit dirty code in my opinion.

But also it allows me to maintain all the classes and. Just not have weird styling that I'm always trying to figure out. So it was a nice shortcut now, as we go through this code and yeah, here, let's expand it out. It's not the most legible, but you can, I mean, essentially go onto this page. Isn't public yet, but we're gonna be launching them soon.

So info.art of accomplishment.com/the podcast, and you'll be able to link to all these page. And from there, you'll just be able to write, click and, and try it yourself and see, and, and you can basically have access to all the HTML code as you can with, you know, any other website. So, so this is the gist of it.

So the thing I was saying about react is you spend a lot of time kind of making views and then having conditions and data plugged in and then serving. So we're, we're doing something that is just a lot the same. So this is how it works. Now let's talk about a few of the things that were maybe like weirdnesses and like WordPress weirdnesses.

You know, one of the things I'll say is I'm not a big fan of WordPress. It just . I don't know if you've seen the movie, everything everywhere all at once. It's nothing like the movie, but the title feels like a good description of how WordPress is anyways. I digress. So what were we just about to talk.

Nice. Oh yeah. Things about WordPress that are a bit funny. So over here, if you take a look in the tax section, like you can see all of the HTML, but like, if I add a line break here, it's actually going to add a line break. To the post, which is so irritating when you're writing HTML, because when you do new lines, you're actually adding in new line.

So you can see here instead of having nice formatting, like all my links are kind of in line. So, you know, that's not like ideal, but it's also not the end of the world. So that's, I think one of the biggest kind of quirks, the other thing is that we. I'm thinking we certainly have the make.com plugin for WordPress installed.

I'm pretty sure that is how make is able to connect so that isn't too too hard to configure, but it is. Like a pretty important thing just to be aware of. So with that, if you found this useful, like in subscribe, we do tons of make work and I've been doing automation now for like five years and working with make for that whole time.

It really is a fantastic platform. If you're designing a process, a flowchart is the logical way to do it. So it's just the correct paradigm. Lastly, I mentioned art of accomplishment to one of our clients and someone I've been a client of as well. And just a fantastic, fantastic source for online courses around personal growth leadership, executive training, but really focusing on the soft skills, connection collaboration.

And Joe who runs a lot of this is one of no the best coach I've ever worked with. So there is the plug for AOA. We only work with clients we really believe in anyways. So check them out. We'll put a link as well. Their podcast is just exceptional life changing wealth of knowledge. So again like, and subscribe, hope you've enjoyed this.

If you have questions, please reach out.

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