370 – Airtable meets WordPress: uniting Airtable’s power with WordPress

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 370 entitled Airtable meets WordPress, uniting Airtable's, power with WordPress. It was published on Thursday, the 25th of April, 2024.

My name's Nathan Wrigley. And in a few moments, I will be chatting to my guest so that we can tell you all about Airtable and how it can combine with WordPress.

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Okay, so what have we got for you today? Well I'm joined by Stéphane Menet. Stéphane is the founder of WP Connect, and this is a really interesting project because it enables you to put data into an Airtable, we also talk about Notion, which is a similar service, but has different attributes to it. And the idea is that whatever data you put into your Airtable will then be automatically populated onto a WordPress website.

Now, it may be that if you're a WordPress professional, the idea of doing that seems peculiar, but imagine that you're somebody who is a complete novice and is familiar with things like spreadsheets, but can't really figure out how to use WordPress. So this may be your clients. And Stéphane has got this intuition that maybe it's easier for them to update an Airtable and then know that that will appear on the website.

And so we talk about all of that today. Really interesting, probably useful to clients. Anyway, I hope. That you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Stéphane Menet. Hello, Stéphane.

[00:04:01] Stéphane Menet: Hello Nathan.

[00:04:02] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. This episode is going to be absolutely brilliant, especially for me, because I genuinely think I'm going to be able to...

To make use of the things that Stéphane is going to be talking about. Stéphane's joining us. he's connected. I dunno if he's a founder, he can explain that to us all in a moment with a company called WP Connect. You can find [email protected], not.com.co. And over there, there's two things we're gonna talk about today.

One of them is binding Airtable. to your WordPress website, but also we'll get into the subject of binding Notion to your WordPress website as well. But before we do that, Stéphane, it's a, very bland question, but it's a good place to start. Tell us about your history with WordPress. How long you've been in the space, what you've been doing over the last, period of time that you've been using WordPress.

Over to you.

[00:04:57] Stéphane Menet: Yes. thank you Nathan for having me. so I will be quick cause, I have a 20 years background. I want, I won't be, too long to explain, but, I'm, more in the. Web strategy, business. I had, web agencies, 10 years ago. And, I'm in the more in the providing services, more than the product business.

I was in, in Paris with, a web agency and we discovered WordPress, yeah, 15 years ago.

[00:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:05:40] Stéphane Menet: so we use it for, for, blogs, for e commerce websites and, but we used as well, another, framework, other framework, other CMS. We didn't use really WordPress, as a principle, tools. we use the Drupal,

[00:06:00] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, nice.

[00:06:03] Stéphane Menet: yeah, we, did a lot of, Ruby on Rails as well. a few years ago. And, uh, I was in Paris and, now I'm in Nantes, since five years ago, since five years. And, so now I run a web agency, Digital Corner. but this is an agency who has, No employee or three employees, only three employees.

And the, main objective is to build, teams with freelancers. depending on the budget of the planning of the type of projects, I call, freelancers. I made a team and they run the project with, with the clients.

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really interesting approach, isn't it? So you get to, build your team each time you do a project, right? That's neat. So

[00:07:04] Stéphane Menet: Yeah, we, I, run, I make a network of freelancers in the, west of France. I, I had a lot of, interview with them. I, I, I, try to, to be, as well as, much as I can, really precise on the. On the client's needs. So I'm looking for the, rights, freelancers to, to, run the project.

I have a lot of, of, contact partners, to, do that. and, yeah, since, two years now, one year and a half. I launched this, new, activity for me, who is not services, who are not services, to, launch, the products, with WP Connect.

[00:08:04] Nathan Wrigley: that's going to be the main thrust of the conversation today. Again, I draw your attention to wpconnect. co. Go and have a poke around there. Maybe pause the audio. And go and have a little bit of a poke around, but, firstly, I think probably we're going to concentrate on air table today because I have more experience using air table, and so I'll be able to field a better quality of question, but we'll also touch on the notion, plugin that you've got as well, but the WordPress plugin for air table is, called air table to WordPress.

And it does what you might imagine now for those people who. don't use Airtable and never have. Firstly, what are you doing? Go and check it out because it's utterly remarkable. Think of a spreadsheet, but a spreadsheet on steroids. So a spreadsheet where each cell can contain really almost any kind of data.

So rather than it just being text, it could be images, it could be dropdowns, it could be radio buttons, it could be Date fields, anything. And, so I think it's fair to say that over the last, I don't know, five or six years, it's become increasingly popular with people in, the, digital space to store the data for their company and what have you, it may be that you put your CRM type data in there.

It may be that you put your financial data in there. It could be anything, but you spotted that it would be quite a neat idea. To be able to update your WordPress website directly from Airtable. So this is a sort of set it and forget it plugin where you connect an Airtable table. You pick the bits and pieces of data that would come out of that table and then get pushed to a page or a post and then.

You press go, you press sync and you're off to the races. So first of all, just tell us what it can do. And if I feel like I need to step in, I will, but what are these sort of capabilities? Why did you build this plugin? Who's it really designed for? I'm guessing it's not specifically for people like. Me, who use WordPress every single day of the week because maybe this is more towards people who are slightly tech savvy but don't really want to touch WordPress.

I'll let you explain.

[00:10:25] Stéphane Menet: Yeah, the idea can, came from, from a client, simply, as that. And the fact that, we, I, I really, look for, another way to manage data, than in WordPress. Cause, it's been like two years, three years now that, the, no code business. I don't know if, you are familiar with it, but, is rising in, accelerating.

And I really, test a lot of tools, in this area. cause I think that, this is a really a revolution, in our, digital space. cause a lot, of tools are coming and, they come, there are a lot more and more accessible. And, the fact is that, no, every, everyone can, touch a tech tool, with this kind of, of, of

[00:11:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:11:39] Stéphane Menet: you have.

Glide, who can, build a mobile app with a spreadsheet. You have Adalo who is, completely, visual program of mobile app. You have air table. As you say, who is that visual database, you have automation tools like make or Zapier who are really, growing. when, when, this, this, kind of tools, emerge, really, test a lot of, them.

And I say, yeah, okay. And now, we, the WordPress, the CMS won't be the only, way to, to manage content, cause, these tools are arriving and we have to do something with that. And I say, yeah, okay, a lot of, enterprise, a lot of society companies are using Percival and.

Obviously, they don't want to, have the data in that table and make a copy paste in their WordPress. Okay. but they, they, do it. the thing is, The idea is simple, doing a connector and we have this, this client who have his entire information system on our table. So we wanted to, to have, this connector.

So we develop it. And we saw that, there was, already a plugin, that exists with, who was called Airpress. I don't know if you, knew

[00:13:32] Nathan Wrigley: come across that, yeah, but not really explored it in depth, but yeah,

[00:13:36] Stéphane Menet: yeah.

the, it was developed by, by a developer, five years ago, I think, four years ago, It was really a pioneer for, the core, for the instance.

but the thing is that this plugin, wasn't, wasn't updated since one year or two years. not, not good for us. So we wanted to have ours. So we, began to, develop it. So we, build a technical plugin. For, these clients and, I say, yeah, why not to do a product and, and sell it.

because obviously, there is, there will be a need, there will be a market and, and that's the case. I made some research. I searched on the web for a table to WordPress and I found nothing. And, I saw some people who are asking to, who are asking to, to, to, to send data from their table to WordPress.

And they have. Absolutely no, no, no answers except, using Zapier third party plugin, or third party tools like, Zapier or Make. So what I wanted to, do is, complete, internal, WordPress and, ecosystem and to have, this plugin, in, in WordPress.

[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: okay, that's, exactly what I assumed, actually. I assumed that you'd come across that plugin and inspected it, but decided to roll your own solution. Now, let's just run through how this works. basically, Airtable, as you said, it's a visual database, but it really does look like a spreadsheet.

it is rows and columns and cells. The, options that you've got available... In those columns though. So just to be clear, you give each column a type. So for example, it might be a single line text, a long text. It might be an attachment, a checks box. It might be a date, a phone number, a URL, currency, percent, duration, rating formula.

I could go on this. There's probably about 25 or so different options, but you give each

[00:16:02] Stéphane Menet: have also relationship

[00:16:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yes,

[00:16:06] Stéphane Menet: and cells,

[00:16:07] Nathan Wrigley: And there's complicated, things that you can do in terms of manipulating that data, but the point being that you can add all sorts of different data in there. Do you consume with your plugin every one of those bits of data?

And we'll get onto how you connect it in a moment or are there any which simply don't? You're unable to bring them across just because they don't really fit neatly into how WordPress stores data. Or can you drag in and sync every single one of those data types?

[00:16:39] Stéphane Menet: The answer is almost yes, Nathan, cause, obviously when we start to launch this, this plugin, we didn't support every, type of, of, of fields cause there is, as you say, There, there is a lot, of, type, feed types. we try to do, our best to, to, to support, the, main types.

And with the, life of the plugin, with the updates, we had. Some, compatibility with, the file, the irritable fight types, and the WordPress, fight types. So no, we, you can find on the, on our website. a compatibility table on the documentation, where we, this is air table where we, we list all the, fight field, type, the field type, with, with the compatibility with the WordPress, field, type.

we have. Yeah, we have, the main, the main field type like, attachment, auto number, barcode, collaborator, count, created by, that, date, currency, email, formula, integer. we have also, roll up,

[00:18:18] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:18:20] Stéphane Menet: Yeah. And some, rich text rating phone. Yeah. So I think we, support, 80, 80 to 90 percent of the, table feed

[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was going to say things like, barcode. It felt like that would be one, which would be totally out, out of, out of reach, but I guess not, I guess there's a way of sucking that in, but then there's, it's probably some others in here, which are very. edge case, realistically though, in terms of a website, is largely text images, maybe URLs, things like that.

you've, definitely got those covered, which might be what, most people are concerned about. And have you found that the, use case for this has been. People who are developing websites, people like me, building client facing websites, and then they can essentially tell their clients, look, here is a super simple, super easy to understand way of updating your website.

In other words, the client logs into Airtable. adds a new row, writes in some text, puts in some numbers, uploads an image and steps away from Airtable because you don't have to save anything. It saves itself on the fly. And then depending on how you've got your, plugin organized, whether it's on a update or sync or delete and all of that kind of stuff, which we'll get to that, the client can then know that they've created a webpage.

They've created a web post just by operating an Airtable. So is that who mostly uses it? Non technical. end users.

[00:20:04] Stéphane Menet: Yes. And no, cause, for now, our, our target, is the WordPress users. we have some no-code who are not familiar with WordPress, and this is more difficult for them, because our plugin is more backend plugin, we have ideas to improve it to, to go to the front, to more, easier with, more easier with, with the template templating, some things like that.

But, for now. we, we, our clients are most of it. Most of them, real estate agencies.

[00:20:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:20:51] Stéphane Menet: real estate theme, directories as well. A little bit of, blogs, but yeah, it's not really, I don't want that. Our, our, airable is a, seen, like ACMS, that's what I said to the, to, to our clients.

Airable is not ACMS and some of them using use, use them as ACMS. But, for me, Atal is a really a database. you have your, data. And you push it in WordPress and you Regan reorganize them in, WordPress and you, display them in WordPress. when we, when you use, exactly, you can have a ti a colon with a title, a colon with a content and a colon with, a featured image.

Yeah. This is the basic stuff you can have as well. A category, you can have tags. Yes. so indeed, this is really simple. You have your, database with the, content field in the columns and, you can synchronize them with WordPress and you can display them really easily.

That's the thing.

[00:22:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. the perfect example there was a real estate website where, everybody's been to a website where you're looking at properties. what does it got? It's got a title. It's probably got a price. So a number field, it's got a variety of images. It might have, I don't know, it might have a video attached with it or something like that.

Some basic text. It might have other fields like, I don't know, number of. Bedrooms, number of bathrooms available, how many square feet there are in the property and so on and so forth. And for, the staff of the real estate agency, like how long would it take them to teach them air table and upload that data to air table?

Honestly, I think it's under a minute. I think you could put that in front of somebody and say, Okay, this is where we store the information. be very careful, don't delete anything by accident. But, this is where you store the data. And it would take them absolutely seconds to figure that out.

Whereas, okay, this is our WordPress website. Here's how, here's where you've got to go to log in. Once you've logged in, you've got to find the menu over here. This is the properties, Custom post type, click on that. You've got to add a new one, then go and upload all the bits and pieces over here. can you drag and drop?

And well, not quite. You've got to click the upload image button or what have you over here. I love WordPress, but I can see that in some use cases, the, one that you've just described, the real estate, it's just, beguiling. It's absolutely perfect. Isn't it?

[00:23:39] Stéphane Menet: exactly. Exactly. We have a big client who is, we're developing only real estate website and they absolutely love our, our, our plugin cause, they use it like every day. They have hundreds and hundreds of, database, table database. They want you to switch to base row actually.

Is an open source, database, visual database. And, we are preparing, yeah, we are preparing a plugin for base as well.

[00:24:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's a rival platform to air table. Is it? That's another similar kind of visual database platform. Okay.

[00:24:22] Stéphane Menet: Yeah, this is, the, alternative, the open source alternative to, to, to

[00:24:29] Nathan Wrigley: What's it called? Base row.

[00:24:31] Stéphane Menet: base role. Yes. This is, ano, European. yeah, this is really cool. cool to cool stuff.

[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, now I've found it, I've, you've basically ruined my day, because now I'm gonna... This is my, oh boy, yeah, okay, there we go. Yeah, this is gonna consume the rest of my day. Okay, never mind that. let's get

[00:24:50] Stéphane Menet: and, yeah. Yeah. So, to get back to, Airtable. Yeah. it's, clients use our plugin and they use as well the grad gravity form to Airtable to plug their, web form to, to airable. So they, receive data and they send data from Airtable to our press. And, they took the.

Both the, ProPlus version because, we have the ACO, plugins, support and the ACF plugins, support as well. so they use, plugin, completely with, the, developing process, development process, they can't leave, without, without it now. And, yeah. So they, they, they, create their custom post type or, um, or they create the custom field in the plugin or, with ACF and they manage to, map their, their, fields.

To, to WordPress and display. then display, the it in the, in their, in their custom, custom team

[00:25:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:26:00] Stéphane Menet: we have as well. two, clients who use it for, we use it for a job board, with w yeah, www p job manager, for example. it works. It works well. so we have really, specific type of sites for now, who are using the, the plugin.

So yeah, directories, real estates and, job, job board.

[00:26:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. That amazing. Yeah. Okay. Let's get into some of the weeds of how the plugin works because I think that would be of interest to most people. First question. This is a yes, no question. Can you use, can you use the free version of Airtable? Do you, can you just have a free account on Airtable and that will work?

[00:26:49] Stéphane Menet: Yes.

[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: perfect.

[00:26:51] Stéphane Menet: even if that's the problem with, a lot of NoCode tools, they are free to change their pricing plan at any time. And that's, that's the, fact with, Airtable, they change, their, pricing plan like, two months ago and they really locked some features in the free plan.

So yeah, you can use it. But for example, you only have. 1000, a calls per month now in the, free plan. So it depends of, your activity, but yeah,

[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And so the, plugin, as we'll explore is using the API to, access. And so as of this moment, so whenever we're recording it towards the end of 2023, the, free version has a number attached to it, a thousand, which may, I imagine in the case of a real estate website, you're not going to be adding a thousand or deleting a thousand properties, a month, but it's worth noticing.

So how do you. How do you bind the WordPress plugin with the, Airtable? I've seen it in your video, but you, basically you have to go in, and copy and paste a few bits and pieces. It's a little bit uninteresting to explain, but you copy and paste things from the URL. Of the air quotes spreadsheet that you're looking at the table that you're looking at and you paste them into the plug in are there any restrictions about the number of different things that you can sync in your free version as opposed to your paid version so the pro version so for example could I set up like a Five or six different ways of syncing data on the free version or do I need the pro version for that?

[00:28:42] Stéphane Menet: the free version. You have, only one connection. actually, you can, import your contents, as you want. except that you can't, you can't sync, CPT. That's the, thing that you can't do with the free version. You don't have CPT and you don't have custom fields

[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: But you can pick pages and posts that would be available in the free version Okay, but if you step up to the pro version you will be able to I don't know and house the estate agent Example you could sync to the house custom post type, right?

[00:29:21] Stéphane Menet: Yep. And you can create custom post type in the plugin if you want as well.

[00:29:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, neat. Okay. Okay. So it'll handle that for you. Oh, okay. and so how do we then pick what data we want to sync? So let's say, for example, we've got, I don't know, 50 rows, sorry, 50 columns in our website, 50, different field types. Do we just, does the plugin, figure out what they're called and we just select them?

Or do we have to copy and paste the exact name of each column, something like that?

[00:29:53] Stéphane Menet: no, cause, table, did, a really good move with the API, one year ago, access to the metadata of, of, uh, so now we, and, since a few months, we, use a token, instead of the API key, so first you have to create a token to access your base, your table, if it, if, we, have to, to, access, by read or, or create things like that.

So you have to create a token and you enter it.

[00:30:36] Nathan Wrigley: sorry, just to interrupt, is that token based upon your entire Airtable account, or is there a per table token?

[00:30:44] Stéphane Menet: no, that's the thing. that's the, it was the, case with the API key, but now with the token, you can choose. you have, more control of, on it's, you, you can choose the base. You can choose the table. You can even choose the, view. you can choose if you want to create something, if you want just to read. So you have a really,

[00:31:16] Nathan Wrigley: neat,

[00:31:17] Stéphane Menet: yeah, it's, it's, better, for, the security and for the accessibility of,

[00:31:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, got it. Okay, so

[00:31:27] Stéphane Menet: so we, we update it, we update, it was a big work for us, to update, from, to, to, pass from the, API key to the, token.

So when you create a token with your base and your tables, And you paste it on the, connection field in the, in our plugin. And when you do that, uh, the, all the base and tables and view, associated to the token will appear in the, in select, multiple select, single select list. When you choose the base you want to connect, you choose the table you want to connect, and you choose the view you want to connect.

you can go, really, deep into that. You can, as well, filter with a formula. If you want only, only, data that you want, that you want to filter, I don't know, you want to filter to a, certain state. in in your, in your, data, you can, filter by, with a formula and right after you have the mapping section,

[00:32:43] Nathan Wrigley: this is where it all starts to happen, isn't it? Yeah.

[00:32:46] Stéphane Menet: and you choose in the select, so you don't have to, write, to type your, the name of your fields, so you choose in the select, All the fields, that is, in your table and you map it in your, WordPress. so you can map with a slug. We can, you can map with the title. You can map with the ACF field that you created, before, if you have the proper version, you can map with anything you have in your, WordPress. You can create custom post type and you can also create custom field that you, that you, that you have in your request.

[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: I get it. so essentially we, we do all the API business, copy and paste all of that over. We pick the view that we want, and we probably should say that Airtable isn't just about looking like a spreadsheet. it can display that data in all manner of different ways. So as a grid, as a form, or at least it can be, it can consume a form so that you can map the form contents to the.

This, the table itself, you could show it in a calendar view, a Kanban view and et cetera, et cetera. But for the purposes of this, let's imagine that we're looking at the grid view, which you could imagine as a spreadsheet. So you, then you pick a, field, and then you map that to a field.

In WordPress, and I'm guessing that you, the ones that you described, you've got a similar version. So if I've got an email field in air table, do I have a similar field in your plugin to map it to? is there always a one to one mapping or does sometimes you just have to pick the best fit?

[00:34:36] Stéphane Menet: we have the, compatibility table, as I say, in the documentation. obviously, a barcode won't work with the, with, a publication

date

[00:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

[00:34:52] Stéphane Menet: so yeah, we, try to, to guide , the, user to, map, fields. and, then for, the, objective that, that it, works.

But yeah, you can map, you can't map a title with a featured image,

[00:35:13] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, perfect. Yeah, that's great.

[00:35:16] Stéphane Menet: but, yeah, you can, do whatever you want. but if you want to have a, custom field, and, CPT, you you can have it, really, really easily.

[00:35:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So let's get stuck into that a little bit then. So you can, use in the pro version, you could map things to your own custom fields, but you could also map it to advanced custom fields, which is a bit meta. So there's options there, which leads me, to how do we display this stuff?

And you mentioned a little while ago that you were a backend plugin. This plugin is not handling the display of that. You, have to figure that out for yourself, right?

[00:36:01] Stéphane Menet: Yeah. for now, what we explained is that we connect. We import data and we synchronize but that's it. the way you want to display, the data on your wordpress is is on your hands because you can do it in several way and we cannot support every type of theme of custom dev, of, page builders and things like that.

the thing is that, yeah, you have to know WordPress and you have to know how your theme is working to display data. So you have to do some CSS, you have to do some blocks, you have to do some, manipulations to, to, display the data. so we are, yeah, mostly a backend plugin. For WordPress developers, this is really, easy, for WordPress advanced user, it's quite easy as well. But yeah, for, for, new WordPress, user or for Neophyte. Or for, people that discover WordPress, it might be maybe a little bit, complicated to, to display data, but, uh, we are preparing, um, some tutorials.

With Elementor,

[00:37:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:37:30] Stéphane Menet: cause, we, we, saw that, the, mapping and, the way, that, to, do, to display data is really simple, in Elementor. yeah, in Elementor, you can, you can, you, do your mapping, you're synchronizing, in, in, in our plugin. And when. The, data is in WordPress, you can do whatever you want.

And with Elementor, this is, this is the case. So you can build a detailed page, you can build a list page with the data that you synchronize from, Artable, with the dynamic tags and things like that.

[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: I would imagine that in a few, in the future, the block editor will also, pretty much now it's possible to map that data dynamically to, to all sorts of places. there may be some caveats, being able to. Consume dynamic data from custom fields is more and more on the table for, non technical users.

So I imagine in the future Elementor, obviously you've made the effort to build that connection, but in the future there's a whole stack of blocks that can do that kind of thing for you. So yeah, you could definitely do this as a non technical user, although you would have to get into the weeds of how to do all of that.

[00:38:50] Stéphane Menet: Some clients are, are, really understand how overplugging works and, when they have as I said, the WP job manager or, a real estate, theme or, or whatever directories theme to, map, the, custom field of, their team, they look for the slug and they map the slug to the custom field or a table and they do it, really nicely and really easily and it works perfectly.

[00:39:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. So that it comes across and it's the exact same. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. How does the synchronization work? Because I can imagine there'll be scenarios where you want this to be a one way sync.

In other words, everything that you put in air table gets synchronized Pushed to WordPress. But let's say for example, I don't know if you delete it in WordPress, your WordPress, sorry, if you delete it in air table, your WordPress post or page or whatever it may be custom post type, it doesn't get deleted.

You may want a complete sync where anything in air table, if it's updated, it gets updated on the website. Maybe you want a. Different kind of sync. So it's going from, I don't know, if you delete something on WordPress, it'll delete it in air table as well. What options do you have for keeping things in sync or not in sync?

[00:40:12] Stéphane Menet: Yeah. we choose to be only, one, not, bi directional. we choose to be, unidirectional. cause we, we think that, the data, Is, uh, have to be stored in, one, one, one position when, to have a really a single source of, truth. when you set up a connection, you can, choose a sync, a sync strategy.

so you have the add, update and delete strategy. You have, add an update. strategy and you have the only add strategy. So if you choose the first one, obviously, when you delete something inertable, it will be deleted in the, in WordPress when, when the sync is, is, once you do that, you can choose a trigger.

we have three types of trigger, manual. when you can choose the frequency, so maybe if you want to, to update, once, once in a week, once in a day, twice daily, once hourly, every 30 minutes, every

[00:41:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:41:45] Stéphane Menet: And, you can choose as well, for example, if you choose, once a day, you can choose the, hours, if you choose, one, once in a week, you can choose the day of the week and the time, things like that.

And you have as well, instantly with the web book. Cause, yeah, the thing is, that's in the air table and that's the power as well. the power of whatever it is that you have the, the visual database. Okay. But you have as well, automations. You can do automations in, in, in your table.

you can do as well interfaces. I don't know if

[00:42:31] Nathan Wrigley: No, I haven't played with that. No.

[00:42:33] Stéphane Menet: Yeah, you can build dashboard. You can build a small application with, with the data. It's really powerful. and you can do automation. So if you want to send, data, uh, instantly when, you modify, and then when you modify a column, when you modify a base.

You can call a webhook and, your WordPress will be automatically, updates with the, new entry of the, with the, text modified.

[00:43:10] Nathan Wrigley: So loads of different options there. but basically you're treating Airtable as the, sort of source of truth. Airtable is the ground zero. That's where everything needs to happen, but there are definitely different options to sync it in all sorts of different ways. I feel like we've.

Probably explained the, air table version. Now, as I said, at the top of the show, you don't stop with air table because again, if you go to the, WP connect website, you'll notice that there's a similar product, but with notion. And again, if you've not used notion, it's a SAS app. it does a very.

Similar thing, but it does it in a very different way. Do you just wanna explain, we don't probably have a great deal of time, but do you just wanna explain the differences primarily between what Notion can do, and why that might be a preferred choice?

[00:44:03] Stéphane Menet: notion is, yeah, when we released the, air WP sync, table to WordPress, we were already, notion users. We were like, okay, if we do, if we, do, a plugin for Airable, we have to do it for Notion, who is the, other, emerging tools that, came across the world is two, is this past two years.

and who is really powerful tool. the thing is that with notion you can do. Almost everything. It can do a lot of things. in notion, for now we use it for documentation and we were like, okay, we write all our documentation on, Notion, we, we want, write it again in, in WordPress.

So we decided to, to, to build. A new plugin to connect, import, and synchronize Notion to WordPress. the thing is that, Notion is like a Gutenberg,

[00:45:16] Nathan Wrigley: that's a good way of describing it,

[00:45:18] Stéphane Menet: yeah,

it, was really, obvious for us to, to use Notion as, source of data, source of content, and to synchronize it to, to work with because there is, some, some, SaaS product who is, who are able to, to take, notion pages, notion databases, and, build, a

[00:45:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've seen those, interesting, yeah.

[00:45:50] Stéphane Menet: Yeah, I like super, so simple, Inc. Friction. So with open source, by the way. yeah, there's a lot of things like that. and there was not, there was no, no, plugin to, to connect WordPress notion to WordPress. I'm really proud to say that we are the only plugin. in the world to connect, Notion to WordPress.

so we did the same. we take the, base, the basis of, of the, Airtable to WordPress, plugin. And we adapt it to Notion. The thing is that Notion, and, and, and, those, database, but you can create pages as well, HTML pages with, with Notion.

So the main difference is that, uh, with the Notion plugin, you can link, connect, synchronize, map, Databases like a table, but you can also, connect, map and synchronize pages. So for example, you have like us, documentation on, your, on your, on your notion, uh, and node database, you can synchronize pages and every block of your notion pages will be transformed in, Gutenberg blocks. We have also, created, a notion block in Gutenberg,

[00:47:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, even better.

[00:47:28] Stéphane Menet: yeah, you can use, you can use a short code to call, some piece of content in your notion to, for example, use it at widget. In your, uh, WordPress pages. so you can, you can, import and map, this piece of content. a short code will be created.

And you can, call this short code in every pages you want, to, display. this piece of content of notion in, in your web pages.

[00:48:03] Nathan Wrigley: That is really quite clever, isn't it? So there's a lot more that you can do because of the nature of what Notion has available. yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. what I would suggest is that everybody... like I said, at the beginning of the show, pause this, go to wpconnect. co.

Have a little poke around. You'll see in the, the primary navigation, there's the Airtable to WordPress plugin. There's the Notion to WordPress plugin. and although we haven't got time for it today, Stéphane did actually mention that there is a Gravity Forms plugin, which will enable you to consume data from a Gravity Form and push it.

To, for example, an air table or notion, but there's also integrations. There's another one for WP form, which is popular and also the ever popular contact form seven. You can, use those solutions as well. So yeah, WP connect dot CEO, go and check that out. Stéphane, if people wanted to ask you questions, they've heard this, they've got an intuition that.

Most of what you said would work for them, but they're not quite sure. They've got some edge cases, perhaps. Where would we find you online? Is it an email address or a Twitter handle? Whatever you like.

[00:49:13] Stéphane Menet: Yeah. You can, you can send us an email on hello at WP connect dot CEO. I will, I will answer promptly and really, No problem. you can follow us on the LinkedIn and the X Twitter, with a WP connect, simple of that. and that's a pretty much, we are in on YouTube as well.

YouTube channel, where we, post, tutorials and, and video to explain what the features of, of our plugin.

[00:49:50] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. So now we know where to reach you. Thank you so much for that. I'm going to waste the rest of the day looking at base row now. thank you for that. but we'll, hopefully, hopefully we'll, we'll find you at some point online in the future, but thank you, Stéphane, for chatting to me about all of the different things that you're doing at WP Connect.

Cheers. Appreciate it.

[00:50:11] Stéphane Menet: Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

[00:50:15] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. A fascinating discussion about putting bits and pieces from Notion and Airtable into your websites. If you've got any thoughts on that, please head over to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 370, and leave us a comment there.

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Okay. That's all I've got for you this week. A couple of things just before I head off.

Don't forget page builder summit.com. It's around the corner. It's happening in the latter part of may. So not that long from now, another four weeks or so. Page builder summit.com. Go over there and join our wait list to be updated when we have some more information.

Okay, that's all I've got for you this week. Here comes some terrible cheesy music generated by AI. And all that I'm going to say now is have a good week. Stay safe. Bye-bye for now.