Requirements

Ensure your server meets these requirements before installing.

Installation

Two installation methods — choose whichever suits your setup.

Method A — WordPress Admin Upload

Method B — FTP / cPanel

Quick Start Guide

From zero to your first AI-rewritten post in under 5 minutes.

Settings — AI Provider

Select your AI provider and enter API credentials. Found at AI Article Importer → Settings → AI Provider tab.

Settings Reference

Settings — Prompts & Behavior

Customize how the AI rewrites titles and content. Found at Settings → Prompts tab.

Available Placeholders

Settings — Content Fetching

Control how articles are retrieved from source feeds and websites. Found at Settings → Fetching tab.

How Full Content Scraping Works

When a feed only provides a summary/excerpt, the plugin scrapes the full article from the source page using multiple extraction strategies: BBC data-component blocks, article body selectors, schema.org markup, and largest-text-block detection.

Settings — AI Features

Enable advanced AI-powered enhancements applied to each imported post. Found at Settings → AI Features tab.

Feature Details

Settings — Publishing

Configure social media auto-generation, newsletter digest, and roundup builder defaults. Found at Settings → Publishing tab.

Social Media Tones

Settings — System

SEO plugin integration, default post status, cron schedule, and logging. Found at Settings → System tab.

Supported SEO Plugins

• Yoast SEO — Title, meta description, focus keyword, OG tags, schema
• Rank Math — Title, meta description, focus keyword, OG tags, robots, schema
• All in One SEO — Title, meta description, keywords, OG tags
• SEOPress — Title, meta description, focus keyword, social tags
• Squirrly SEO / The SEO Framework — Basic meta support
• None (Basic) — Writes meta tags directly via wp_head

Feed Sources

Add, edit, and manage your content sources at AI Article Importer → Feed Sources.

Supported Feed Types

Per-Feed Feature Toggles

Each feed has independent toggle controls for AI rewriting, SEO optimization, image downloading, and full-content scraping. This lets you run some feeds with AI rewriting disabled (for manual review) while others are fully automated.

Topic Profile (Relevance Filter)

When set, the AI evaluates each article against the topic description and skips off-topic content. Example: setting Premier League football, transfer news on a general sports feed will filter out cricket, F1, and other unrelated articles.

AI Providers & Models

Six AI providers supported — switch between them at any time without losing data.

SEO Integration

Automatic SEO optimization for every imported post — works with all major SEO plugins.

What Gets Generated

• Meta Description — AI-crafted 150–160 character SEO meta description
• Focus Keyword — 2–4 word keyphrase derived from AI analysis (or title-based fallback)
• SEO-Friendly Slug — AI generates a concise 3–6 word URL slug
• Open Graph Tags — OG title, description, and image for social sharing
• Schema Markup — Article schema type set for Yoast and Rank Math

Plugin Compatibility

Image Handling

Complete image pipeline — downloads, localizes, optimizes, and generates AI alt text.

What Happens to Images

Video Handling

YouTube, Vimeo, and native video embeds found on source pages are preserved and re-injected into the post content. Video post format is set when no featured image is available.

Social Media Posts

AI-generated captions for X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Instagram. Found at AI Article Importer → Social Posts.

How It Works

• Auto-Generate on Import — When enabled in Settings → Publishing, social captions are generated for every imported post automatically.
• Manual Generate — On the Social Posts page, click Generate on any post that doesn't have captions yet.
• Regenerate — Click Regenerate to get fresh captions for any post.
• Copy to Clipboard — Each platform caption has a one-click Copy button.

Platform-Specific Output

Newsletter Digest

Build AI-crafted HTML email digests from your best recent posts. Found at AI Article Importer → Newsletter.

How To Use

What Gets Generated

• Email Subject — Compelling subject line
• Intro Paragraph — 2–3 sentence engaging opening
• Article Summaries — One sentence hook per article with thumbnail, title, and Read More link
• CTA Block — Call-to-action button linking to your site (or custom URL from settings)
• Responsive HTML — Mobile-friendly email template with inline CSS

Roundup Builder

Synthesize multiple articles into a single high-value roundup/listicle post. Found at AI Article Importer → Roundup.

How To Use

What Gets Generated

• SEO-Optimized Title — AI-crafted listicle title
• Engaging Intro — 2-paragraph HTML introduction
• Per-Item Commentary — 2–3 sentence original insight per source article (not just a summary)
• Source Links — Each item links back to the original post
• Conclusion — Closing paragraph wrapping up the roundup

Admin Dashboard

Real-time overview of your content pipeline. Found at AI Article Importer → Dashboard.

Statistics Cards

• Active Feeds — Enabled feeds out of total. Green when at least one is active.
• Total Posts Created — Cumulative count of all posts ever imported.
• Posts Today — Posts created since midnight (server time).
• Errors (24h) — Error-level log entries in the past 24 hours. Red if non-zero.

System Status Panel

Environment & Debug Panel

Shows PHP version, memory limit, max execution time, DOM/cURL extensions, WP version, plugin version, stuck rows count, and cron lock status.

Activity Logs

Full activity log at AI Article Importer → Logs. Your first stop when debugging.

Log Levels

Actions

• Filter by Level — All / Info / Warning / Error tabs with AJAX live-filtering.
• Clear Logs — Permanently deletes all log entries from the database.
• Auto-pruning — Oldest entries are automatically deleted when count exceeds Max Log Entries.

Cron / Scheduled Fetching

The plugin uses WP-Cron for scheduling. A real server cron job is strongly recommended.

Setting Up a Real Cron Job

# Via wget — run every 15 minutes
*/15 * * * * wget -q -O /dev/null "https://yoursite.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron"

# Via WP-CLI — most reliable option
*/15 * * * * cd /path/to/wordpress && wp cron event run --due-now --quiet

Manual Fetch

Trigger an immediate fetch for any feed by clicking Fetch Now on the Feed Sources page. Bypasses the schedule and runs in the background via a loopback request.

Custom Prompts

Fully customize AI writing style via editable prompts in Settings → Prompts tab.

Prompt Writing Tips

• Specify output format — "Output as clean HTML paragraphs" or "Output as plain text".
• Control tone — "Write in a conversational tone" or "Write in a journalistic tone".
• Control length — "Expand into a 600+ word article" or "Keep under 400 words".
• Add brand voice — "Write from the perspective of a sports analyst".
• Avoid meta-commentary — Always end with "Do not include any intro sentence or explanation."

File Structure

All plugin files live inside /wp-content/plugins/ai-content-syndicator/.

Frequently Asked Questions

Check the Logs tab for specific error messages before raising a support ticket.

Changelog

Support

Please follow these steps before opening a ticket — most issues are resolved by checking the logs first.

What to Include in a Ticket

• WordPress version and PHP version
• Plugin version (1.0)
• AI provider being used
• Relevant log entries copied from the Logs tab
• Description of what you expected vs. what happened

Plugin Details