The need for a new workflow

So publishing a new blog post using WordPress has always been a bit of a hassle. I mean, WordPress as a platform is wonderful, but if you want to publish a new blog post, for example, you are forced to interact with the WordPress app or via the WordPress admin login on your website.

And to post anything, you’ve got to press lots of buttons, clicking here and there, getting everything situated according to the WordPress user interface.

Lots of clicking, lots of typing in multiple text boxes, lots of time taken just to make a quick post.

And normally I write within my text editor, not the WordPress admin login using my web browser.

So I wanted a way to write out a quick blog post in my text editor, click as few buttons as possible, and have that properly formatted text appear as a new blog post on my WordPress website.

Having recently purchased Pythonista 3, I thought that might be a good tool to test an easier way to interface with WordPress.

Python all the way

So I experimented by writing a few minimal Python scripts. Basically I wanted to be able to type in my text editor (like I’m DOING RIGHT NOW), click as few buttons as possible, and have that text rendered into properly-formatted HTML, which could then be easily pasted into a new WordPress blog post.

After a few false starts, I stumbled onto a nifty markdown to HTML python library that converts Markdown to HTML (natch).

So that’s what I tried with this test.

  • First, I wrote this blog in Markdown.
  • Then I copied this text to my iPad Pro’s clipboard.
  • Next I ran my Python conversion script using Pythonista.
  • Finally I launched WordPress, and pasted my HTML into a new blog post document.

After a few more clicky-clicks in the WordPress app, I was finally able to click publish — and that’s what you are reading right now!

Oh, and all of this was done on my iPad. Who says iPads are just for content consumption?

Still not as elegant as I would like — for example, why am I forced to go through a WordPress app — why doesn’t WordPress make an API available, so I don’t have to use their clunky apps?

Nevertheless, it’s an improvement.

Until next time

So, onwards and upwards, with the path illuminated by Pythonista.

PS: next I’ll work on a version of the Pythonista script to also publish images…