New suggestions

Having now used WP Pipes quite extensively may I make some suggestions that I think will make this excellent product much better — easier to use and much more powerful.

1) Pipe editor.
PROBLEM: At present it is impossible to drag and drop processors to change their order or clean up the pipe so it’s easier to understand. Also if you delete a processor the old po and pi that link to the deleted processor are left.

SOLUTION: Allow processors to be move and update all [po] and [pi] numbers when the processor is move to have the new number. Similarly when processor is deleted reset all references to “click me”.

2) New processor.
PROBLEM: The combine processor is useful, but primitive as there are no string functions (search, left, right, etc.), as well as conditionals (if then else), regular expression search and replace, etc.

SOLUTION: New processor called “PHP Processor” which allows full PHP and also the {[so] xxx}, {po[xx] html} etc. and would use https://php.net/manual/en/function.eval.php
This way there would be no restrictions on what could be done in a pipe.

Also the HTML parser replace should allow regular expressions. (It says it supports wildcards but I can not figure out how use them as ? does not work).

3) Reporting and logging.
PROBLEM: There are no email or other alerts when a pipe runs to indicate what was done, errors etc.

SOLUTION: Allow logging and e-mail reports of all actions by a pipe:

a) Pipe name
b) Time it ran
c) For each item processed:
(c.i) title,
(c.ii) source link,
(c.iii) result,
(c.iv) new post link and edit link,
(c.v) if error, error message and which processor caused the error,
(c.vi) if stop, which processor caused the stop.

Email subject should have the name of the pipe.
If there is an error or stop, then add “ERROR” or “STOP” to email subject.

With proper alerts by email and logging we can know the pipes are running ok or if there was a problem and don’t need to check.

4. Better reporting from HTML parser.
PROBLEM: Debug option does not allow reporting of an error message if a line fails.

SOLUTION: For HTML parser there should be an option to provide an error message for each line that has the debug option. So options would be:

{DEBUG}: debug mode in the case the {DELIMITER} cannot be found from INPUT HTML source.
0: return “” (empty string) in the case an error occurs.
1: stop immediately in the case an error occurs.
2: return INPUT HTML source.
<text>: Error message to return and report in logging and emails.

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