WP Trend Watcher

WP Trend Watcher is a lightweight, open-source workflow for helping WordPress developers stay informed about changes in the WordPress ecosystem through AI-assisted, human-reviewed analysis.

The goal is not to automate opinions, replace expertise, or publish without review.

The goal is to collect useful WordPress ecosystem updates, summarize them efficiently, review them with human judgment, and produce a weekly report that developers can actually use.

Latest Reports

Published weekly reports are available at colorful-tones.github.io/wp-trend-watcher.

Intended Audience

Freelance and agency WordPress developers who want to stay current without reading every Make post, Developer Blog update, and ecosystem article.

Requirements

• Node.js 22 (pinned in .nvmrc and engines). nvm is recommended for version management but not required.
• pnpm 11 (pinned in packageManager). Corepack ships with Node.js and provides the correct pnpm version automatically when enabled.
• Corepack enabled — run corepack enable once per machine.
• git — to clone the repo.
• A local LLM provider for summarization: LM Studio, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Collection, doctor, and review work without one, but summarization requires it.
• macOS, Linux, or WSL2. The tooling assumes a Unix-like environment.

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/colorful-tones/wp-trend-watcher.git
cd wp-trend-watcher
nvm use
corepack enable
pnpm install
cp .env.example .env   # edit if using a different model or provider
cp sources.example.yaml sources.yaml  # optional: customize sources
pnpm collect           # add -- --days 7 for recent articles
pnpm summarize         # requires a local LLM endpoint for summarization

Summarization requires a local LLM provider (see Requirements above). LM Studio users should set WP_TREND_MAX_TOKENS=2048 in .env for predictable report generation. The CLI automatically loads .env from the project root.

What This Does

pnpm collect         # Fetch RSS feeds from 6 sources (4 Tier 1 + 2 Tier 2), store articles as JSON
pnpm summarize       # Fetch article content, generate summaries, synthesize the weekly report, and build HTML + index
pnpm generate-report # Regenerate the report from saved article summaries
pnpm index-page      # Regenerate the reports index.html listing page
pnpm doctor          # Check environment readiness before first summarize
pnpm review          # Review checklist for the latest report
pnpm weekly          # Run the full weekly workflow (doctor → collect → summarize → review → review server)

pnpm weekly is the recommended single-command workflow. It runs doctor, collect, summarize, and review sequentially, then starts a local review server at http://127.0.0.1:3001/review where you can view automated checks, read the rendered report, and save your "What I'm Watching" observations. Saved edits update both the canonical Markdown report and regenerated HTML. Press Ctrl-C to stop the server when you're done.

Use pnpm weekly -- --no-open to skip the automatic browser launch.

Individual commands remain available for diagnosis and recovery — for example, running pnpm collect or pnpm summarize separately when you only need that step.

pnpm summarize produces an HTML report alongside the Markdown file and writes shared report styles to reports/assets/report.css. The Radio Canada variable font is copied to reports/assets/ alongside it. Reports are deployed to GitHub Pages on every push to main via the pages.yml workflow. Configure GitHub Pages to deploy from the github-pages environment (Settings → Pages → Source: GitHub Actions).

See Summarization for provider configuration, model options, and synthesis strategy.

Project Principles

• Human reviewed.
• Budget conscious.
• Provider agnostic.
• Open source first.
• Simple before clever.

See:

• Weekly Workflow
• Project Philosophy
• Sources
• Summarization
• Human Review
• Cost Notes
• Contributing

Feedback & Sources

Found a gap in the latest report? Open a report feedback issue.

Want to suggest a new RSS source? Open a source suggestion issue.

Both templates walk you through what's needed — takes about a minute.

Changelog

0.7.0

• Added markdown-it dependency; report HTML generation and the local review server now share one Markdown renderer (src/summarize/renderer.ts) instead of two bespoke converters.
• Renderer keeps raw HTML disabled and strips unsafe link schemes (javascript:, data:, vbscript:) so generated pages stay safe even from untrusted feeds.
• Article Inventory now renders inside a collapsible <details> element (closed by default) with a visible article count, de-emphasizing long vertical lists without removing the data.
• Report sections render in a configurable presentation order (DEFAULT_PRESENTATION_ORDER), so generated HTML layout can change without rewriting report history. Canonical Markdown data stays the source of truth.
• Added a free-form Review time field to the local review page (Build Notes) and the review API; it persists to the Review time: line in the canonical Markdown.
• pnpm regen-html now refreshes all report HTML from existing Markdown with no LLM calls; historical report data is unchanged.
• Added the Radio Canada variable font to generated HTML reports: the shared stylesheet declares a @font-face rule and uses it as the primary body font, with system fonts as fallback. The font file is copied into reports/assets/ at generation time (alongside report.css and icon.svg) so it ships with GitHub Pages deployments.
• Added standard SEO and social-sharing meta to generated HTML reports and the index page: description, canonical link, Open Graph tags, and a summary_large_image Twitter card. The shared assets/WP-Trend-Watcher_1200x630.png is copied into reports/assets/ so the Open Graph image resolves on GitHub Pages deployments. All meta URLs are absolute to the colorful-tones.github.io/wp-trend-watcher/ site root.
• Bumped package version to 0.7.0.

0.6.0

• Added pnpm weekly single-command workflow: doctor → collect → summarize → review → local review server.
• Added localhost-only review server (http://127.0.0.1:3001/review) for browser-based human review.
• Review page displays automated checks, rendered report, and an editable "What I'm Watching" textarea.
• Saving via the review page updates the canonical Markdown report and regenerates matching HTML atomically.
• Human-authored "What I'm Watching" content is now preserved during same-date report regeneration (pnpm summarize and pnpm generate-report).
• Added pure Markdown section helpers (src/review/report-edit.ts) for extracting and replacing the "What I'm Watching" section.
• New docs/human-review.md updated to mention the local review page.
• Added 36 new tests for report editing, preservation behaviour, and review server request handling.
• No new runtime dependencies — uses Node.js native HTTP server.

0.5.0

• Added pnpm watch zero-dependency live-reload dev server with SSE browser reload.
• Added project icon to report headers and index page (flexbox-aligned with h1).
• Added pnpm regen-html command to batch-regenerate all report HTML from existing Markdown — no LLM calls.
• Refined report CSS: cleaned-up header, horizontal table-of-contents layout, tighter spacing on build notes and footer.

For older releases, see the GitHub Releases page.