Post to WordPress from Airtable automatically

Who says No-Code and WordPress tools can’t be great companions? In this article I show you how to auto post to wordpress from an airtable databaseusing an extension called WP Air Sync…

He went away !

1 – Why do you want to automate posts on your WordPress site?

In fact, you may be asking yourself this question and don’t really see the point in doing it… However, there are loads of them! Here are some situations where this feature can be quite useful:

• Multi-Author Blog : Imagine that you maintain a blog with several authors, perhaps you could not allow them free access to your administration… In this case, a common Airtable database could serve as an intermediary.
• E-commerce site: with the pro version of Air WP Sync, you can publish product sheets. Then imagine the speed to publish or make updates.
• Training site: If you are a Qualiopi certified training organization, you know that one of the quality criteria is to publish the program of each training course on your site, with each update. If you use Airtable to list all your programs and update them in real time, you will save a lot of time.
• Documentation Center : if you maintain an online help center, this may be the case if you offer SAAS services, it will be easy to keep your product documentation up to date thanks to the automatic synchronization between Airtable and your WordPress site…

In short, these are just a few examples among many others!

Now that you can imagine the interest a little more, I’ll explain how to do it…

2 – Air WP Sync Tutorial: creating the database

Access your Airtable account online. If you do not have one, you can create a free account, the functions we need here are not charged. You can use my partner link if you want.

Inside your “WorkSpace”, create a new database, then:

1. create a new Table virgin you can name” WordPress Posts » or whatever you want… For my example, it will be called « blog posts« .
2. Add all the columns we will need, namely:
   • REFEREE for “Reference” (optional column) = column type single line text
   • Qualification = column type single line text
   • Content = column type long text
   • Extract = column type long text
   • Publication date = column type Date
   • Image = column type Attach
   • Slug = column type single line text
3. For testing, you can create a new record, like I did in my example (screenshot above) with a reference, title, content, etc.
4. Speaking of content, make sure to enable the option “Enable Rich Text Format” when you create the column. This will allow you to format the text with links, titles, bulleted lists, quotes, bold, underline, etc.

Also, learn how to create a blog post scheduler with Airtable.

3 – Link between Airtable and WordPress

Now that your Airtable is ready to submit content to be published on WordPressit will be necessary to create a bridge between the two, thanks to the extension WP Air Sync…

1. go to tab Extensions > Add, search for “Air WP Sync“, install it and then activate it. For the rest of this tutorial, the free version will suffice.
2. go to tab Air WP Sync > Add New then click the Add Connections button.
3. in the insert import as, you can define if the content you send is Articles or Pages. In the Pro version, you will be able to publish custom post types and even WooCommerce products. For my example, I choose to publish articles. You can also define the status and author of these posts.

4. in the insert Air Table Setupyou need to enter your API key and database credentials.
5. To do this simply go to the top right of your Airtable account to get to your account click on Account.
6. Select General descriptionif it hasn’t already been done.
7. Copy your API key and paste it in the appropriate field within the connection settings (in your WordPress).
8. Go back to your Airtable and copy part of the URL to extract application id. Starts with application and is between /two slashes/ (for example: apphXSi68xxx). Paste this identifier in the appropriate field within the connection settings (in your WordPress)
9. Do the same for get table id. Starts with problem and is between /two slashes/ (for example: tblhJG2xxxxxxx). Paste this identifier into the appropriate field within the connection settings (in your WordPress).

10. Then in the insert Field mapping, just match the Airtable columns to the import types to perform. For example, Title > Title, Content > Content, etc. I specify that it is up to you to manually enter the name of the fields, try not to make a mistake, because the absence of capital letters or an extra letter could cause the link to fail.

You will notice in the screenshot below that I checked the option ” Convert Airtable Rich Text Format for the Content field (and possibly the snippet, though I doubt that’s necessary). This will allow the imported text to use the correct HTML tags (H2, H3, strong, etc.)

11. Then in the insert Synchronization settings, you can choose the import strategy: add, add and update, add, update and delete. I think it makes sense to choose the second or third option. So, every time you make an update on your Airtable, your site will be able to sync in this regard.
12. Additionally, you can choose to trigger synchronization manually or at regular intervals.

13. Finally, you will have to go back to the top of the screen to publish this new connection.
14. You can then click sync now to send the the content of your Airtable is published on your WordPress site.
15. If everything is OK, you get a success message.
16. If you make changes within the connection (for example, add a mapping), don’t forget to click update (and Sync again).

Now you can visit your site… Yippee! The Airtable article has been published…

Going to the administration, you can see that the article has been published. We also see the item in the item list…

If you edit the article, we see that everything was published correctly. However, the content appears in a classic block. I find this unfortunate, but the developers of the extension assured me that they were working on full compatibility with the gutenberg blogging.

If we visit the article, we see that the text is correctly formatted: titles, links, quotes, bold, etc. appear correctly!

Pretty cool, right?

4 – Go further with the pro version of Air WP Sync

Personally, I don’t see myself automatically publishing my articles on La Webeuse. Especially since it is difficult to add images within the content, it would be necessary to go a second time within the article, so it is not very interesting.

On the other hand, with the Pro version, you can publish another type of content, and above all, you can mapping with WordPress custom fields to then call them within a theme template for example.

This is the method I use for my training site and you can see for example in my WordPress training sheet that it is fully compatible with Theme Builders like Divi or Elementor Pro.

I will explain in a future article how to do this.

Also learn how to create an SEO cleanup program using Airtable.

5 – In conclusion

air table is still unknown, but it is so powerful that I automated my whole business with: quotes, invoices, contracts, agreements and other Qualiopi documents, training management, publication on social networks, publication on my site, etc. I started with Notion, but it doesn’t allow me to do the same things…

Also, if you’re more of a “Team Notion” type, WP Connect – the French company that publishes this extension – has also created an extension that allows post to WordPress from your Notion account. I’ll tell you about it in a future article…

In the meantime, what do you think of this feature? Do you think it can be useful to you? If so, how?