For a long time, I have been thinking of setting up a pipeline for simplifying the capture, remix, and publish workflow. Obsidian has become my choice of capture following years of searching for a note taking platform. Without an open platform, it is impossible to build customized workflows. One critical piece of the workflow is publishing. This morning, as I was setting up a github ci pipeline for publishing – I found Obsidian WordPress plugin. This post is a live blogging (well, without timestamps), as I dogfood setting up and publishing.
Setting up the plugin
As of today, this is the single plugin for WordPress in the community plugin store, and it has a decent number of stars. The repository on github shows last update was from four months back; though low on star and fork counts, the issues showed there is fair bit of traction.
You can setup using a profile to associate with a wordpress account – be it self-hosted or wordpress.com. My blog is self-hosted and setting it up was painless.
Steps for generating the application password
Luckily the last issue at the time of writing had a helpful comment on how to setup the application password
- Edit Profile (top right corner)
- Scroll down to the bottom “Application Passwords”
- Enter a name for the application password “New Application Password Name”
- Copy the auto generated password.
- From Plugins Settings open the WordPress and click on
Openbutton for Profiles. - (Optional) Set the API type to REST API Authentication by Application Password
- Fill in
Remember Usernamewith the same WordPress username used to generate the application password and paste the copied password intoRemember Password. - Hit
Save
You are now all set to publish to your blog from Obsidian.
Publishing Workflow
An icon for WordPress is shown on the left sidebar. Clicking on it brings up the following
Post status we definitely want to be draft, for checking how the formatting is handled. The Category option was auto populated with the tags that I have published my previous articles – that was impressive!
Searching for publish under commands filters to exactly what you need.
Now, the moment of truth. I have attached a number of screenshots above, lets see how it handles the images when I try to publish.
Success!
And it delivered! After hitting publish the modal stayed stuck for a few seconds, while uploading the content through the REST api. It could benefit from a progress bar, but very impressive!
✅ Changing the title of the post
✅ Updating content and publishing
Bugs
- Image links seem to get broken on republishing sometimes, though it is easy to fix by replacing the urls in the markdown and republishing
- Password in the profile settings does not hide the password
Still to try
Well, that was simple enough! I intend to keep this post updated with whatever might be useful, and hopefully contribute back to this helpful project.
[ ] Making edits to a published post
[ ] Workflow from mobile