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

So let’s start with the big picture. When it comes to the NZRT setup, WordPress and GitHub work together through a combination of webhooks, REST APIs, and GitHub Actions. The key thing to understand is that there are two separate sources of truth here. Code lives in GitHub, and content lives in the WordPress database. Those two responsibilities never cross over, and keeping that distinction clear makes the whole system much easier to reason about.

When you push code, it flows from GitHub through a GitHub Actions pipeline and lands on the WordPress server via SSH. If product data changes in WordPress, a webhook can fire and sync that change over to Dolibarr through its API. Theme files, plugin code, and configuration are all version controlled in git. And you’ve got two environments to work with: the develop branch deploys to staging, and the main branch, via a release tag, deploys to production.

Now let’s talk about how the code itself is organised in the repository. Picture a root folder called dolibarr-custom. Inside that you’ve got a wp-content folder, which contains a plugins folder and a themes folder. Under plugins, there’s a plugin called wp-sync-core, and inside that you’ll find a src folder with three sub-folders for Admin, Frontend, and API logic. Alongside src there are folders for templates, and assets which holds CSS and JavaScript. The plugin’s main entry file sits at the root of that plugin folder, along with a composer.json for PHP dependencies. Back in wp-content, the themes folder holds the nzrt-theme, which contains template parts, assets, a functions file, and a stylesheet. At the very root of the repository you’ll also find the main WordPress config file, an environment variables file, a Docker Compose file for local development, and a readme.

Let’s walk through the product sync flow, because this is where a lot of the integration magic happens. When you edit a product in the WordPress admin, WordPress fires a REST API hook. The wp-sync-core plugin picks up that event and prepares a request for Dolibarr. That request packages up the product name, SKU, price, category, images, and any relevant metadata. It then sends a POST request to the Dolibarr products endpoint to either create or update the record. Once Dolibarr responds, WordPress stores the Dolibarr product ID and a timestamp in its own post metadata, so you always know when a product was last synced and what its Dolibarr identifier is. Finally, the event gets written to an audit trail for traceability.

The PHP code that handles this lives in a class called DolibarrSync inside the API folder of the plugin. It reads the Dolibarr API URL and your API key from the environment, then defines a method that accepts a WordPress product ID. It fetches the product details, builds a payload with the label, price, tax rate, and status, then sends that payload to Dolibarr using WordPress’s built-in HTTP helper. If the request fails, the error gets logged. If it succeeds, the returned Dolibarr ID gets saved back into WordPress meta. Clean, self-contained, and auditable.

Now for the deployment pipeline. The GitHub Actions workflow triggers whenever you push to either the develop or main branch. It starts by checking out the code on a fresh Ubuntu runner, then sets up PHP version eight point one. Next it installs Composer dependencies without the dev packages, then runs a PHP lint check across every PHP file in wp-content to catch any syntax errors before anything hits a server. The deploy step then reads your deploy key from GitHub secrets, writes it to a temporary SSH key file, locks down its permissions, adds the target host to the known hosts file, and finally SSH’s in to run a git pull on the server. The target host is determined automatically: main branch points to production, any other branch points to staging.

For local development, you’re using a Docker Compose setup with two services. One runs the latest WordPress image connected to a MySQL database, maps port eighty through to your host, and mounts your repository folder directly into the web root so changes are instant. The other service runs MySQL eight, creates the dolibarr-custom database on startup, and exposes port three three zero six for direct database access.

That’s the full picture: code in GitHub, content in WordPress, syncing to Dolibarr via the plugin, deployed automatically through Actions, and reproducible locally with Docker.

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