Here is how I started with a new Airtable account and a new WordPress installation.
Sign up for a free Airtable account at https://airtable.com. Enter your email, name etc. Verify your email address.
Your Airtable dashboard will show buttons. Click “New Base” and “Start with a template”. Scroll down and click on Art Gallery, then on the next page, click the red “Use Template” button.
On the top right header, click the blue user head icon icon, then Account dropdown. Click “Generate API key”. It will be spelled ‘key’ followed by scrambled stuff. You will need that. Then…
Just below, see the text “The API key is needed in order to use the Airtable API. Check out the Airtable API documentation for more information.” Ok they don’t make it so easy to find it. Click that link, on the next page below Standard Api, click the Art Gallery link, and on the next page, scroll down to the Authentication section. Hidden on the right side column is something like this:
curl https://api.airtable.com/v0/appAb34CD56EF78/ArtistsCopy just the bit that is like “appAb34CD56EF78”. That is the app id, it has ‘app’ at the front.
For WordPress, you can use a new or existing installation. New pages will be added for the Airtable views so it will not clobber pages you already have. This will work on your personal computer installation of WordPress, or on a host.
Install two plugins, ‘Insert PHP’ and Airpress.
In WordPress admin, go to Plugins, click Add New, and search for ‘Insert PHP’, by Bontrager. Install and activate.
👉 Note: The Insert PHP plugin has been deprecated, meaning it is not recommended anymore by Bontrager, as they have a replacement plugin. For an example of using the Woody Ad Snippets plugin, see my project Wordpress Airtable Museum
Next plugin is ‘Airpress’, by McLaughlin. Search for, install and activate.
There are some things to configure here. In the Admin left margin, find Airpress and select Airtable Connections. Enter these things:
Configuration Name – make up something, like Art Gallery
Airtable API Key – the Airtable key you saved
Airtable APP ID – the Airtable app ID you saved, for this database
The other fields can be default. Logging is good for debugging, but optional. If you enable logging, you will need to create the logfile someplace, and make it writeable.