Automatically Publish Articles to WeChat Official Accounts Using Obsidian

Every time I update content on the website, I also need to update the WeChat Official Account. Over time, I wanted to find an automated solution.

Currently, the WeChat Official Account backend doesn't support directly uploading and parsing Markdown files. Editing them in the backend is a task that almost no ambitious modern person wants to do.

Being under its roof, I had to bow my head. Previously, I used a tool like doocs/md to preview locally and then manually copy it to the Official Account backend.

The pain points are as follows:

• The front-end resources that the doocs/md web version depends on load slowly, requiring a VPN, which is inconvenient;

• If installed and run directly locally, it defaults to switching to Chromium. I mainly use Firefox, and sometimes I forget to switch. After copying to the WeChat Official Account backend, I find that some theme styles are not working, causing layout errors, and everything has to be redone;

• From the above two points, it's clear that if a button could be clicked to automatically publish to the drafts box and then automatically redirect to the WeChat Official Account backend page, the counterintuitive steps would be greatly reduced, significantly increasing efficiency.

Therefore, I want to use the Obsdian plugin for automatic publishing.

Benefits:

• Obsidian's Markdown editing and preview experience is excellent (although I primarily use Zed for editing, with some added automatic formatting logic);

• Obsidian's plugin system is impressive, with many automated plugins already written;

• If you have the time or interest, you can customize these plugins;

• Obsidian allows you to choose very beautiful Chinese fonts (LXGW WenKai / 霞鹜文楷) without affecting IDEs like Zed;

• I'm used to using it for taking notes and am quite familiar with it.

Many people have written related plugins; currently, I've chosen Wechat Publisher. There are several similar plugins on the official plugin marketplace, but I haven't had time to compare and test them. Choose one based on your needs.

1. Installing Wechat Publisher

Wechat Publisher is available on the official Obsidian community plugin marketplace. I recommend installing it directly from the marketplace:

1. Open Obsidian "Settings".

2. Go to "Third-Party Plugins / Community Plugins".

3. Click "Browse".

4. Search for "WeChat Publisher" or "wechat".

5. Click to install and activate the plugin.

It's worth noting that accessing Obsidian's official plugin marketplace requires a VPN, fully demonstrating the advantages of socialism. If you don't like it, go to your local community service center and wait in line for a lesson.

2. How to Use

After activation, click the WeChat Publisher icon in the left sidebar of Obsidian, or press Cmd/Ctrl+P to search for "WeChat Publisher" to open the preview panel.

The steps are shown in the image below. A little practice will get you started.

After completing some basic settings (explained later), finally click the button shown in icon 3. It will automatically publish to the WeChat Official Account's drafts box, thus largely eliminating the need for human editing and formatting (the plugin comes with some default templates, or themes, adapted to WeChat Official Accounts), saving time, which is crucial!

3. Configuring Automatic Publishing

Automatic publishing, as mentioned here, means that this plugin automatically publishes your articles to the WeChat Official Account's drafts box.

The principle is roughly to use the WeChat Official Account's AppID, AppSecret, and IP whitelist to call the official API to publish your articles to the drafts box.

Configuration screenshot:

The author thoughtfully included an automatic IP detection function. If you still don't know how to configure it from the images, you can directly refer to the author's documentation

4. Other

From my personal experience, it still has some shortcomings for my scenario and requires additional customization.

For example:

• Automatically select and process Hugo image links, thumbnails, etc.;

• Automatically process so-called frant matter, keywords, etc.;

• Other settings, etc.

In addition, the default themes it provides feel somewhat lacking.

The author developed this plugin for free personal use, so why expect more? If you have the motivation and ability, you can modify it yourself in the future, since your needs are quite specific.