Description

Sophi.io is a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed by The Globe and Mail to help content publishers make important strategic and tactical decisions. The tools range from automated content curation engines to predictive analytics and paywall solutions.

Sophi-driven pages outperform human curated pages by a significant margin and free up publisher resources so that they can focus on finding the next story that matters. Invisible, automated curation of your home and section pages to streamline your team’s workflow. Continuously optimize the performance characteristics of the site based on demand and your brand, so the content is always the right fit.

Note that a Sophi.io account and related credentials are required in order to authorize and authenticate access within the plugin settings.

Highlights of Sophi.io service

• An automation platform capable of transforming your business.
• State of the art natural language processing to enable prediction and optimization.
• Tomorrow’s publishers rely on Sophi to better understand their audience and make sure every pixel is used to drive value efficiently and effectively.
• Sophi Automation: Automates your digital content curation to display your most valuable content in the most valuable places on your website, on social media and in newsletters.
• Sophi Dive: Uses your historical data to help content publishers and editors determine what content to produce more or less of and what to stop doing all together — which enables intelligent decision-making around resource allocation.
• Sophi Now: Equips you with analytics that provide real-time, tactical decision support that can tell you what content to promote more prominently, or less prominently; find out what’s over-performing and underperforming on a particular page; and find out why a particular article is doing well or not (for example, is it driving subscriptions, helping retain subscribers, getting traction on social media, search or newsletters, etc.) and where readers are coming from and going next on your website.
• Sophi Next: Flags a short list of articles that have just been published (but not promoted anywhere) that are likely to be your most valuable content going forward. This helps editors decide which headlines to place on a particular page — helping them find the hidden gems.
• Sophi for Paywalls: A fully dynamic, real-time paywall engine that understands both content and users and can optimize for several outcomes and offers simultaneously.

Usage

There are two ways that Sophi Site Automation results can be included in a WordPress site, via a Site Automation block and a direct integration with WP_Query. More details on each of these options are described below.

Site Automation block

You can utilize the Site Automation block by configuring the Site Automation page and widget names and adjusting block content and post meta settings to display Site Automation content on your site.

The Site Automation block comes with a barebone HTML output and styling. It’s made to be filtered using sophi_site_automation_block_output.

add_filter(
    'sophi_site_automation_block_output',
    function( $output, $curated_posts, $attributes, $content, $block ) {
        // ...
        return $new_output;
    },
    10,
    5
);

The Site Automation block will automatically add a data-sophi-feature=<widget_name> attribute for the rendered HTML content so Sophi can understand what content section is rendered on your site.

Query integration

The Site Automation block uses query integration under the hood. You can query for Sophi curated articles by passing sophi_curated_page and sophi_curated_widget to your WP_Query queries.

$the_query = new WP_Query( [
    'sophi_curated_page'   => 'page-name',
    'sophi_curated_widget' => 'widget-name',
] );

Note that you need to add data-sophi-feature=<widget_name> to the wrapper div of your post for Sophi to capture your widget better.

<div class="posts-wrapper" data-sophi-feature="trending">
    <!-- Post lists -->
</div>

Post content type

By default, Sophi for WordPress uses post format as the content type. This plugin uses content_type internally to distinguish between WordPress post type and Sophi type.

Sophi accepts 4 types: article, video, audio, and image. The default type is article. Any other types that are not included above will be treated as article.

If you’re not using post format for content type, you can utilize sophi_post_content_type to set the content type.

add_filter(
    'sophi_post_content_type',
    function( $type, $post ) {
        // You logic here.

        return $new_type;
    },
    10,
    2
);

Canonical URL

Sophi for WordPress uses wp_get_canonical_url function introduced in WordPress 4.6 to get the canonical URL for given post. The plugin compares this canonical URL to post permalink to set the isCanonical attribute.

WordPress SEO (Yoast) canonical is supported out of the box. For other SEO plugins and custom implementations, get_canonical_url filter can be used to change the canonical URL.

Documentation

Sophi for WordPress has an in-depth documentation site that details the available actions and filters found within the plugin. Visit the hook docs ☞

Developers

If you’re looking to contribute to or extend the Sophi for WordPress plugin, then the following sub-sections are things to be aware of in terms of how the plugin is architected.

Dependencies

1. Node >= 8.11 & NPM – Build packages and 3rd party dependencies are managed through NPM, so you will need that installed globally.
2. Webpack – Webpack is used to process the JavaScript, CSS, and other assets.
3. Composer – Composer is used to manage PHP.

NPM Commands

• npm run test (runs phpunit)
• npm run start (install dependencies)
• npm run watch (watch)
• npm run build (build all files)
• npm run build-release (build all files for release)
• npm run dev (build all files for development)
• npm run lint-release (install dependencies and run linting)
• npm run lint-css (lint CSS)
• npm run lint-js (lint JS)
• npm run lint-php (lint PHP)
• npm run lint (run all lints)
• npm run format-js (format JS using eslint)
• npm run format (alias for npm run format-js)
• npm run test-a11y (run accessibility tests)

Composer Commands

• composer lint (lint PHP files)
• composer lint-fix (lint PHP files and automatically correct coding standard violations)

WP-CLI Commands

Sync content to Sophi Collector

$ wp sophi sync [--post_types=<string>] [--limit=<number>] [--per_page=<number>] [--include=<number>]

Sync all supported content to Sophi Collector, firing off update events for all of them. The expected use case with the Sophi for WordPress plugin is that someone will install it on an existing site and instead of having to manually update each piece of content to ensure that it makes it to the Collector, they can run this script to handle that all at once.

Options

--post_types=<string>

Post types to be processed. Comma separated for passing multiple post types.

default: false
options:
– any post type name
– false

--limit=<number>

Limit the amount of posts to be synced.

default: false
options:
– false, no limit
– N, max number of posts to sync

--per_page=<number>

Number of posts to process each batch.

default: false
options:
– false, no limit
– N, max number of posts to sync each batch

--include=<number>

Post IDs to process. Comma separated for passing multiple item.

default: false
options:
– false, no limit
– N, Post IDs to sync