A publishing engine with real hooks, a REST surface and no black boxes
You are the one who gets paged when a bulk job locks the database at 2am. So the generation layer needs to be queue-based, idempotent and inspectable.
- Batch size
- Configurable
- Idempotency
- Job-keyed
- Extension points
- 40+ hooks
- CI ready
- REST + CLI
Default 200 rows per worker tick, tuned to your host.
Re-running a batch does not duplicate posts.
Row, field, schema and post-array filters.
Generation, dry run and rollback are all scriptable.
Modelled at current defaults: 12,400 indexed URLs → 446 signups per month.
What actually hurts in this seat
Developers judge a publishing plugin by three things: what it does to the database, what it exposes to extend, and whether it fails safely. WpBulkPublishing runs generation through batched queue workers, writes with idempotent job keys, exposes filters at every transformation point and ships a REST namespace so you can drive the whole thing from CI instead of the admin UI.
Bulk plugins that write 40,000 rows in one request and take the site down.
No hooks where you need them, so every customisation becomes a fork.
Generated content that cannot be reproduced, diffed or rolled back.
The four jobs this engagement owns
Queue-based generation
Jobs are chunked, resumable and idempotent. A failed batch retries from its last checkpoint rather than restarting the whole run.
Hooks at every seam
Filters on the data row, the rendered field, the schema object and the final post array — so you extend rather than fork.
Drive it from CI
A REST namespace and WP-CLI commands mean generation can run from a pipeline with the diff posted back to the PR.
Keep the DB sane
Indexed lookup tables, no unbounded postmeta sprawl, and a documented cleanup path when a family is retired.
Four stages, each with a named output
Environment parity
wp-env or Docker setup matching production PHP, MySQL and object-cache versions, so a generation run behaves the same locally.
Reproducible dev environment + seed data.
WordPress Developers workstreams
REST API & hooks
The full extension surface: REST namespace, WP-CLI commands and the filter list with firing order.
OpenExtending WBP
Patterns for building your own add-ons on top of the generation engine without forking it.
OpenCode snippets
Copy-paste snippets for the twenty things developers actually ask for in the first week.
OpenQuery shapes this surface answers
These are patterns, not a keyword list. Each one multiplies against the entities in your own dataset — which is where a 20,000-URL first batch comes from.
Are you ready to build this?
Not yet. Fix the unchecked items first; publishing now would create pages we would later consolidate.
Size it with your own numbers
Developer-led builds where the data pipeline is owned in-house and generation runs from CI. Indexation is held at a conservative 62%.
- Indexed URLs
- 12,400
- Monthly organic clicks
- 49,600
- signups per month
- 446
- Modelled monthly value
- $62,440
A model, not a forecast. Move the sliders to your own conversion economics — we will run the same maths against your data on the call.
240,000 rows without a single long-running request
- Setup
- A directory site whose previous importer timed out at roughly 8,000 rows and left orphaned postmeta behind.
- Mechanism
- Action Scheduler-backed batches of 200 with idempotent job keys, an indexed lookup table instead of meta queries, and a documented teardown routine.
- Result
- 240,000 rows generated over 14 hours of background workers, peak query time unchanged, and a clean rollback path that actually worked.
How wordpress developers usually solve this — and what changes
| Dimension | The usual approach | With WpBulkPublishing |
|---|---|---|
| Generation | One long HTTP request | Chunked queue workers with checkpoints |
| Customisation | Fork the plugin | Filters at row, field, schema and post level |
| Storage | Unbounded postmeta | Indexed lookup tables with a teardown path |
| Automation | Admin clicks | REST namespace and WP-CLI in CI |
What the first weeks look like
- Week 1
Scoping call and data review
We look at what wordpress developers already hold — systems, exports, APIs — and score each axis for demand and defensibility.
- Weeks 3–4
Contract and template design
The data contract is written and the first template is designed against real rows, not placeholders.
- Weeks 5–8
First tranche live
3,000–7,000 URLs published with schema, internal links, sitemap entries and IndexNow.
- Weeks 9–14
Read, widen, hand over
Indexation and impression data decides what widens and what gets cut. Templates, gates and runbook transfer to you.
Questions we get asked in this seat
Yes — source is readable on the install, the REST surface is documented, and every hook is listed with its arguments and firing order.
Every seat we build for
Each role gets its own data reality, its own template families and its own definition of a good outcome. Pick the seat you sit in.
You do not have a content team. You have a spreadsheet, a product and limited runway. That is enough to publish a few thousand pages that answer real searches.
See the build
You know the query shapes, the entity model and the internal-link plan. What you do not have is a publishing layer that will do it at 40,000 URLs without breaking canonicals.
See the build
The bottleneck in an agency is never the pitch. It is fulfilment cost per client and the senior hours that disappear into repeatable work.
See the build
Your team can produce 12 excellent pieces a month. The keyword plan needs 400. Programmatic covers the pattern work so your writers cover the judgement work.
See the build
The affiliate sites that got hit had one thing in common: pages that existed to hold a link, not to answer a comparison.
See the buildVolume is not your problem. Consistency of markup, byline integrity, archive structure and crawl efficiency across 100,000 URLs is.
See the buildA 12,000-product catalogue is already a programmatic dataset. The question is which slices deserve a URL and which quietly cannibalise the ones that convert.
See the buildThe honest answer for some startups is no. A validation tranche tells you in eight weeks rather than after four quarterly board decks.
See the buildYour product already generates the data these pages need: features, integrations, permissions, limits, changelogs and docs. Most SaaS companies never publish any of it as a page family.
See the buildThe marketing team wants 40,000 pages. You want to know what that does to your infrastructure, your security posture and your team's pager.
See the buildThe board question is never 'how many pages'. It is what this channel returns, when, and what happens to it if you cut headcount.
See the buildWhen pages are generated from data, page families behave like features. They deserve the same discovery, the same metrics and the same willingness to sunset.
See the buildEverything upstream of a generated page is a dataset question: fill rates, drift, entity resolution and provenance. That is your domain, not marketing's.
See the build
Listings churn weekly. Neighbourhood, school-catchment, commute and price-trend pages do not — and they are what people search before they search a property.
See the build
In YMYL, an unreviewed page is not a small risk. The architecture has to make clinical sign-off a gate, not a nice-to-have.
See the buildLegal content dies in approval, not production. Build the review path into the template and the volume problem solves itself.
See the buildIn finance, a stale number is a compliance incident. Freshness is not an SEO tactic here — it is the product.
See the buildApplicants compare entry requirements, fees, duration, delivery mode and outcomes. Most education sites publish prose about campus life instead.
See the build
Travel search is the most seasonal, most comparison-driven category there is — and the most punishing to generic destination prose.
See the build
Fourteen locations does not mean fourteen copies of one page with the town name swapped. That is the exact pattern that gets filtered.
See the buildYou do not have a content team. You have a spreadsheet, a product and limited runway. That is enough to publish a few thousand pages that answer real searches.
See the buildYou know the query shapes, the entity model and the internal-link plan. What you do not have is a publishing layer that will do it at 40,000 URLs without breaking canonicals.
See the buildThe bottleneck in an agency is never the pitch. It is fulfilment cost per client and the senior hours that disappear into repeatable work.
See the buildYour team can produce 12 excellent pieces a month. The keyword plan needs 400. Programmatic covers the pattern work so your writers cover the judgement work.
See the buildThe affiliate sites that got hit had one thing in common: pages that existed to hold a link, not to answer a comparison.
See the buildVolume is not your problem. Consistency of markup, byline integrity, archive structure and crawl efficiency across 100,000 URLs is.
See the buildA 12,000-product catalogue is already a programmatic dataset. The question is which slices deserve a URL and which quietly cannibalise the ones that convert.
See the buildThe honest answer for some startups is no. A validation tranche tells you in eight weeks rather than after four quarterly board decks.
See the buildYour product already generates the data these pages need: features, integrations, permissions, limits, changelogs and docs. Most SaaS companies never publish any of it as a page family.
See the buildThe marketing team wants 40,000 pages. You want to know what that does to your infrastructure, your security posture and your team's pager.
See the buildThe board question is never 'how many pages'. It is what this channel returns, when, and what happens to it if you cut headcount.
See the buildWhen pages are generated from data, page families behave like features. They deserve the same discovery, the same metrics and the same willingness to sunset.
See the buildEverything upstream of a generated page is a dataset question: fill rates, drift, entity resolution and provenance. That is your domain, not marketing's.
See the buildListings churn weekly. Neighbourhood, school-catchment, commute and price-trend pages do not — and they are what people search before they search a property.
See the buildIn YMYL, an unreviewed page is not a small risk. The architecture has to make clinical sign-off a gate, not a nice-to-have.
See the buildLegal content dies in approval, not production. Build the review path into the template and the volume problem solves itself.
See the buildIn finance, a stale number is a compliance incident. Freshness is not an SEO tactic here — it is the product.
See the buildApplicants compare entry requirements, fees, duration, delivery mode and outcomes. Most education sites publish prose about campus life instead.
See the buildTravel search is the most seasonal, most comparison-driven category there is — and the most punishing to generic destination prose.
See the buildFourteen locations does not mean fourteen copies of one page with the town name swapped. That is the exact pattern that gets filtered.
See the buildWant this scoped for wordpress developers before you commit?
We audit your data, size the first batch, model the economics and tell you honestly when programmatic is the wrong tool for the job.
