Category Archives: WordPress

Posts relating to the Wordpress software and its use for this site

New Technical Articles Published

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WordPress has two main ways of managing content: Posts and Pages. Posts appear in reverse-date order on the main screen and are intended for time-based “news” updates whereas Pages typically contain more static content and are accessed via the hierarchy of menus under the photo at the top of the main screen.

My new Posts automatically appear on the main screen but any updates to Pages do not, although I do periodically tweak the Pages (for example I’ve recently changed the way the Staircase Scrapbook photos are structured). I don’t intend to announce every Page update with a separate Post but I will probably post a reference to any major new Pages or really substantial changes to existing pages.

For some time there’s been a menu for Technical Articles to which I’ve just added two new entries:

  • Domestic Hot Water Pipe Sizing is one I’ve had in draft for some time but not published before. It still needs completing with the specific conclusions for the pipework in my house but the references to other resources might be of interest.
  • Data and Power at the Gate is documenting my ongoing research to decide how to supply data (i.e. a computer network connection) and power to the to-be-automated gate on Aston Lane.

Automated Uploading of Image Media to WordPress

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In terms of documenting the build progress I’ve settled on a basic pattern of uploading an “end of day” photo from the time-lapse camera and then adding that to a daily Post, both with a title of “Week A, Day B“. I’ve been doing that manually up to now but since there’s a pattern it means it’s something that can be automated with a little code.

From the research I’ve done so far it seems the standard way of doing such things is to use WP-CLI, a Command Line Interface for WordPress which must be run on the same computer as is hosting the WordPress installation. The CLI supports various operations relating to the installation and maintenance of WordPress itself and also the management of content like Posts and Media.

As a first step I’ve automated the uploading of the 16:00 daily photo as a WordPress Media item which can then be manually embedded in a Post. (All the hourly snapshot photos have always been automatically copied to the same server as is hosting WordPress anyway.) As a test I’ve also managed to automatically create a Post but automatically inserting the Media into the Post is proving more challenging so I’ll come back to look at that later.

Update 2015-11-17: Turns out inserting Media into a Post isn’t all that complicated after all. I’ve settled on the following approach:

  • Create a placeholder for the Post, recording the Post ID number once that is created.
  • Upload the Media (image file), specifying that it should be Attached to the Post by citing the Post ID number and recording the Media ID number which is returned as a result of a successful upload.
  • Going back to Update the Post, generating a file containing the Post content, which is the visible text plus quite a bit of HTML for the attachment of the image. That HTML requires knowledge of the Media ID number, which is why it can’t be specified before the Media has been uploaded.

Seems to work OK. When I get chance I come back and add some more descriptive text manually but at least the daily photos should be visible without any human intervention.

I’m not sure if the 16:00 photo will be usable once we get closer to the shortest day. It might be too dark, in which case I’ll need to use the 15:00 photo instead.