Getting started with VulgatAI

WordPress copies the files across and offers Activate Plugin. A moment later, VulgatAI shows up active in your plugin list, and its own menu appears in the sidebar with four screens: Dashboard, Sources & import, Translate with AI and Terms.

If the provider you want isn't connected, click "Configure" or "Activate" next to its name and paste in the API key you generated on its site.

Every tab has a side index of its groups, with Expand all and Collapse all, and the section on screen is marked as you scroll. Open Language and model. Target language is the code you translate into (for example "en"), independent of your wp-admin's own language. Under AI model, Automatic skips the pricier models; you can pin a specific one from your connectors instead. Translation destination says where your own translations go: linked to the original if Polylang or WPML is available, an independent post otherwise, always as a draft for you to review. What to translate lets you tick title, content, excerpt, slug, SEO and taxonomy terms.

The Glossary group has two lists. "Do not translate" keeps brand and product names exactly as written, and "Fixed translations", per target language, pairs an original term with the exact translation it must always get. The fidelity report flags a translation that did not use one.

Further down, Notifications turns on an email when a background import or translation fails, grouping repeated failures so it doesn't flood your inbox. And Data lets you export every VulgatAI setting, sources included, as a JSON backup, or import one on this site or another. In the Translate with AI group of the Dashboard tab you also choose which roles can use it (step 12), and the Updates group at the bottom of that tab shows the installed version and holds the licence key.

Automatic import is two independent switches, Bring in new posts and Keep the imported posts up to date, and the second one asks whether to keep your edits or overwrite with the source for posts you changed here. With both off, a source does nothing on its own and you import by hand, and How often and How many (the per-check limit) are dimmed rather than hidden until one of them is on. New posts only come in automatically once published on or after a start date, which defaults to the day you add the source or, for an existing source, the day you updated the plugin. Older posts stay one click away in the source's Content list, and updates to posts already imported ignore the start date.

Translate on import decides whether VulgatAI translates what it brings in or just autoposts it in its original language. Status sets whether each new entry lands as a draft or published, and it only applies to new posts, because updating an imported post later never changes the status it has. The publication date has three choices, the publication date at the source (the default), the date of its last change at the source and the date of the import. Saved as sets the local post type that imported content is created as (Post by default), and Author who is credited with it.

Cleanup and links holds three things. "Exclude on import" removes parts of the original before it is translated, one pattern per line: a block name such as jetpack/sharing-buttons, a shortcode in square brackets, a CSS class with a leading dot or an id with a hash (block names apply to imports with credentials, classes and ids to imports without them). "Link back to the original" ends each imported post with a line made of a prefix you choose, such as "Source:", and a link to the original post. And the settings for links pointing at the source site decide what happens to them.

Each source opens on its content, with its settings folded below in groups (Content, Connection, What to bring, Automatic, How posts arrive, Terms, Cleanup and links) and a sentence saying what the source does. A new one starts with its form, with Name (to identify it, optional), Type (REST API or RSS), the source URL and its language.

A setting a source takes from the general options is marked "General". "Change here only" overrides it for that source, and "Back to the general setting" undoes the override.

Click Check source before saving anything. VulgatAI confirms the URL responds and, while it's there, counts what the source holds in each of its collections and fills in the categories or tags you can exclude. It remembers that answer, so the list survives a page reload instead of falling back to Posts and Pages.

Save with Save changes, at the bottom of the page.

Each row shows the publication date and, when an item changed later, "Updated ... ago", marked when that happened in the last week. The list is ordered by recent changes by default, can be ordered by publication date instead, and can be filtered to All, Not imported or Changed at the source (a filtered view looks a few pages ahead at a time, with a "Look further" button). An imported post whose original changed shows a "Changed at the source" note with an Update button, and one older than the source's start date shows "Before the start date: by hand only".

Click that button on any entry and wait: the import brings over the content, images and taxonomies, and the translation follows right after, in the same operation.

Each term carries the reason it ended up where it did: assigned by you, chosen by the AI, matched by name, taken from the glossary, created by VulgatAI, ignored, or not decided yet. The filters (All, To review, Automatic, Assigned by you, Ignored and Undecided), the search box and the taxonomy filter narrow the list down, and every term shows the posts imported with it. A dot in the side index flags a source that has decisions waiting, and the same count shows in the source's header and in its Terms group.

The bulk actions are Assign to..., Mark as reviewed and Ignore. Assigning a term that VulgatAI created merges it into the term you chose, and the same Merge into... bulk action is available on the Categories and Tags screens, and on any other taxonomy screen, for any term. Both ask for confirmation first, listing every source term and source involved, the posts that move and the archive URL that stops existing, and the term that survives keeps every mapping that pointed at the one it absorbed.

It only appears on posts that carry a comparison, so the rest of your rows stay as clean as they were. It is deliberately kept apart from the activity log: the log tells you what happened, this tells you what the post ended up looking like.

Whatever couldn't be resolved is listed here too, and it stays in the content instead of being deleted. An RSS source has no media API to ask for a gallery's images, and an image may simply be gone from the origin, so in both cases the reference is left where it was and you can fix it by hand.

Once you have fixed what you could, saving the post re-checks it and drops whatever the content no longer shows, so the flag comes off on its own. What has no fix at all, an image the origin no longer serves and that every re-import would lose again, can be marked as reviewed instead, one at a time or the whole list at once, which closes it without touching the post and leaves its comparison readable. A later import of the same post flags it again if it loses something.

The same button covers both cases. If the post is the translation of one of yours, it is rebuilt from that original. If it arrived already translated from an external source, VulgatAI fetches the original again from the site it came from and rebuilds it with that.

A "What does this do?" toggle inside the panel, in both editors, explains it on demand, next to the hint shown the first time you open it. Re-translating keeps the status the post already has, so a published translation stays published.

Translating your own content works the same way from the post list, through the Translate link on each row or the "Translate with VulgatAI" bulk action. All of those run on the same chunked engine as the imports, so your host's time limit can't cut a long post short, and the notice afterwards names the posts involved as links instead of just counting them.

Import fidelity has its own line on both the card and the widget, green while your imports match their originals and amber when one of them doesn't, with a link straight to the posts worth a look. If you haven't scheduled any source yet, Scheduled sync says so; once a source starts checking for updates on its own, through Action Scheduler or WP-Cron, that same card confirms it.

It opens from a link in the admin bar on any admin screen (just an icon on small screens) or from the command palette, so it also works inside the full-screen block editor. It doesn't dim the page or close when you click outside it, you can move and resize it, and it remembers its position and size for each person. Its menu entry opens that same window.

It runs on what the site already has, the connector you configured, the model in your settings and your glossary, so what comes out here is what an import or a translated post would give you. Nothing you paste is written to the database or shown in the activity log. The ⇄ button between the two boxes translates, and Copy translation puts the result on the clipboard without you having to select it.

Administrators can always use it and editors can by default. In the Translate with AI group of the Dashboard tab you choose which other roles get access, everyone other than administrators and editors gets a daily character allowance, and only administrators can pick a different model for a run.

It is also the cheapest way to settle the questions that used to need a whole import to answer. Whether a stronger model is worth its price on your kind of writing, or whether the term you just added to the glossary is respected, takes one paragraph and a couple of seconds here instead of a run of forty posts.