ByteTidings: An AI-Built WordPress News Site with an Automated Publishing Pipeline

ByteTidings (https://bytetidings.com) is a tech news website with the tagline “Tech news, explained simply.” I built it on WordPress with a custom theme and a custom plugin, and I developed both with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. The main idea of the project is an automated publishing workflow, so I can go from a finished article to a live post with very little manual work.

Publishing news quickly involves a lot of repetitive work: writing the article, filling in SEO fields, adding images, pasting content into the editor, and setting categories and tags. I wanted a workflow where I write each article once in a structured format and the website takes care of the rest.

The workflow has six steps. First, I write each article as a JSON file that holds the title, URL slug, short excerpt, meta description, focus keyword, category, tags, key takeaways, the article body in HTML, sources, editor notes, and the featured image name, alt text and credit. Second, I add the featured image, named to match its article. Third, I push the JSON files and images to GitHub. Fourth, GitHub Actions deploys the changes to the website automatically, so I never upload files by hand. Fifth, my custom plugin reads the JSON files and creates the posts in WordPress. Sixth, I log in to the WordPress admin, check each post, and publish it.

For this project I built a custom WordPress theme designed for fast reading of news content, a custom import plugin that turns structured JSON article files into WordPress posts, a JSON article format that keeps content, SEO details and image information in one file, and a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub and GitHub Actions for automatic deployment.

Claude helped me develop the theme and the plugin, and I also used it to help research and draft articles in the JSON format. I check the facts, review every post before it goes live, and make the final decision to publish, so a person stays in control of what is published.

The tech stack is WordPress, PHP, a custom theme, a custom plugin, JSON, Git and GitHub, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, and Claude for AI-assisted development.

From this project I learned how to design a content format that is easy for both people and AI tools to produce, how to build and maintain a WordPress plugin that imports structured data, how to set up automated deployment with GitHub Actions, and why a human review step matters when AI helps with content.