I am experimenting with blog publishing automation. I use this blog as a glorified bookmark manager. But adding images is tedious. Therefore, I created an automation. When I publish a new post, this workflow is triggered in make:
You can see the result in this post’s profile image.
Make is painful
But getting there was quite painful. I wasted half a day on that. The main problem was that the Make connector succeeded, but did not create an image in WordPress. As it did not fail, there was little information for troubleshooting.
The Make Connector log showed successful authentication when Make loaded information from WordPress, such as categories. But when I actually ran the scenario, there was no POST request for creating the media item. The same happened when I reduced the test to creating a simple draft post.
Make’s AI support sent me down a wrong path by claiming that the JSON Basic Authentication plugin was mandatory. It isn’t. That plugin belongs to Make’s legacy WordPress integration. The current integration uses the Make Connector plugin and its API key.
I then started eliminating possible conflicts:
- I disabled every WordPress plugin except Make Connector. Still broken.
- I disabled caching. Still broken.
- I disabled the CDN. It worked.
- I enabled the CDN again. It continued to work.
- I enabled caching and all plugins again. It still worked.
So I found a fix, but not a definitive root cause.
The most plausible explanation is some stale or inconsistent state in the CDN. The CDN sits between Make and WordPress, so it can interfere with REST requests before they ever reach WordPress. Disabling and re-enabling it apparently cleared that state. This would also explain why neither WordPress nor Make Connector reported an error.
The lesson for next time is to troubleshoot from the outside in. If Make reports success but WordPress sees no request, check the layers in front of WordPress before changing WordPress itself. In my case, toggling the CDN would have saved several hours.
If this happens again, I will also test the /wp-json/ REST API directly with curl before changing anything. That should make it much easier to determine whether the problem is in Make, the CDN, or WordPress.
