Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Nextcloud WordPress Integration.

If you work with NZRT’s content or user management systems, this episode is going to give you a clear picture of how Nextcloud and WordPress talk to each other — and why that connection matters for your day-to-day work.

Let’s start with the big picture. Nextcloud and WordPress are integrated across three main areas: user authentication, media asset storage, and collaborative content editing. Nextcloud acts as the media library backend for WordPress, meaning it’s the central place where files live, and WordPress pulls from it rather than managing everything on its own.

Let’s talk about user sync first. NZRT uses something called LDAP and single sign-on, or SSO, to connect accounts between the two systems. What that means for you practically is this: when a new Nextcloud user is created, a corresponding WordPress user gets created automatically. And you only need one password for both platforms. You log in once and you’re covered across both systems — no separate credentials to manage.

Now let’s look at media management. WordPress media assets — things like images, photos, and press release files — are stored in Nextcloud rather than sitting inside WordPress itself. This happens through the REST API, which is essentially a way for the two systems to communicate and pass data back and forth. The specific folder in Nextcloud that handles this is called WordPress Media, and it’s shared with the content team. Featured images and uploads get automatically backed up there too, so you have version control and an archive without any extra effort on your part.

To give you a sense of how the technical side is configured, there is a setup that points the WordPress LDAP plugin to an internal server address, specifies a base directory location for user accounts, and sets a user path within that directory. On the Nextcloud side, there is an API endpoint pointing to the WordPress Media folder, using a combination of a username and a token to verify access. You do not need to memorise any of that, but it is worth knowing these two systems are talking to each other constantly in the background.

Now let’s walk through the actual content workflow, because this is what you will interact with most. An editor logs into WordPress using their normal single sign-on credentials. From there, an author writes a blog post inside WordPress. But here is where Nextcloud steps in: draft documents live in a Nextcloud folder called WordPress Drafts, and the team can edit those directly using Nextcloud Office, the built-in collaborative editing tool. Once a post is ready to publish, the featured image auto-syncs from the Nextcloud media folder into WordPress. And when the post goes live, a version is saved into a Nextcloud archive folder for long-term storage.

So you can think of it as a two-track system. WordPress is your publishing front-end — it is where the post goes live and where readers see it. Nextcloud is your back-end storage and collaboration layer — it is where files live, where the team edits together, and where everything gets archived.

Speaking of folders, here is how the Nextcloud WordPress directory is structured. At the top level there is a folder called WordPress. Inside that you have a Media folder, which contains three subfolders — one for Blog images, one for Press Releases, and one for Photos. Then there is a Drafts folder, where you would find documents like a named blog post file for a specific month. And finally there is a Published Archive folder, where completed posts are stored for reference.

The key people working within this integration at NZRT are pam and ema — the content team — who use Nextcloud Office to collaborate on blog posts before they go live. By keeping media assets in Nextcloud rather than relying on WordPress alone, the team gets version control, easy sharing, and a reliable archive all in one place.

If you want to dig deeper, there are a few related topics worth exploring. There is an Integrations Overview document that gives you the wider picture of how NZRT’s systems connect. There is also a dedicated page on LDAP and SSO if you want to understand the authentication side in more detail. And Nextcloud Office is worth a look if you are going to be collaborating on drafts.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.