Zinn® Connector

Zinn® Connector links a WordPress site hosted anywhere to Zinn Digital®, so the articles you write and schedule there are published here automatically — with their images, in the category and under the author you choose — and, if you want it, the whole site is backed up off-site.

If you write your articles in Zinn Digital® and this WordPress site is hosted somewhere else, this plugin is how the two are introduced.

Paste a pairing code from your Zinn Digital® dashboard and the plugin creates a WordPress application password for itself and hands it to Zinn Digital®. You never see or copy the credential, so it cannot be pasted into the wrong window or left in a support ticket.

The plugin does not change your site. It adds no endpoint, no shortcode and nothing to your public pages, and it makes no outbound request at all until you pair it.

Everything it sends is listed under External services below. In short: one request when you press Connect, a connection-status check for its own screen, and — only if you switch scheduled backups on in your Zinn Digital® dashboard — an hourly check for a due backup, plus the upload itself when one is due.

What you can do with it

• Pair in one step. A single-use pairing code replaces copying an application password between two browser tabs.
• Publish scheduled articles automatically. Articles go live straight away, or arrive as drafts if you would rather read everything first.
• Decide what may happen on your site. Choose the author shown on each article and the category it lands in, and switch image uploads, edits to earlier articles and a per-article email notification on or off.
• See whether the connection works. The status panel says whether the site is paired and, when something is wrong, what is wrong and what to do about it — with a button to check again.
• Disconnect for real. “Disconnect this site” deletes the application password, so the credential Zinn Digital® holds stops working at once.
• Back the site up off-site (optional). Files and database are archived and streamed in fixed-size chunks straight to object storage, so memory use does not grow with the site. Leave folders out, set a size limit, and a backup is skipped rather than started when the disk has no room for it.
• Ask for help without exposing secrets. A support report shows you the exact, already-redacted payload before anything is sent.
• Use it in your language. Every screen is translated into 57 languages, right-to-left included.

Who it is for

Anyone who writes, schedules or commissions articles in Zinn Digital® for a WordPress site that Zinn Digital® does not host — a client’s site, a brand site on another host, or a network of sites. Sites hosted with Zinn Digital® are connected for you and do not need it.

What it needs

• WordPress application passwords must be enabled (they are, by default, on any site served over HTTPS).
• The WordPress user connecting the site must be able to publish posts. The credential inherits that user’s permissions.

Disconnecting

Press Disconnect this site on the plugin’s Connection tab, or revoke the “Zinn Digital® (publishing)” application password under Users → Profile → Application Passwords. Deactivating the plugin does not revoke it, deliberately — deactivating a connector to test something should not silently stop your publishing.

External services

This plugin connects your WordPress site to Zinn Digital® so that articles scheduled there are
published to this site. It is useless without that service, and it only ever talks to it.

What is sent, and when

• Pairing (once, when you paste a pairing code and click Connect). The plugin posts the code
  to https://api.zinndigital.com/v1/connector/claim together with your site URL, and — this is
  the part to be clear about — it creates a WordPress application password for the connecting
  administrator and sends that password to Zinn Digital®. That credential is what lets the
  service publish posts to this site through the WordPress REST API. It is created by
  WP_Application_Passwords, is scoped to one user, and is visible and revocable at any time
  under Users → Profile → Application Passwords.
• Disconnecting. Removing the connection deletes that application password from this site, so
  the credential Zinn Digital® holds stops working immediately.
• Scheduled backups — only after you connect them in your Zinn Digital® dashboard and paste the backup token here. A
  WordPress cron event then asks https://api.zinndigital.com/v1/connector/backup/claim, once
  an hour, whether a backup is due; the answer is normally “no” and nothing else happens. When
  one is due the plugin builds a .tar.gz of this site’s files and database, uploads it
  straight to object storage using a short-lived, single-use URL the previous answer supplied
  — the archive never passes through Zinn Digital®’s own servers — and then posts the outcome
  to /v1/connector/backup/complete. Until you paste a backup token, that hourly event finds no
  token and returns without contacting anything.

No content, visitor data or analytics are transmitted. The plugin makes no outbound request
of any kind until you pair it.

Service terms: https://zinndigital.com/legal/terms
Privacy policy: https://zinndigital.com/legal/privacy

• Support diagnostics (only when you press send). If you ask us for help, the plugin can send
  a support report to https://api.zinndigital.com/v1/connector/diagnostics. You are shown the
  exact payload first, already redacted, and nothing leaves your site until you press send.
  Credentials are excluded by declaration rather than by matching key names, and render as
  [not sent — credential]. The plugin never sends this on its own initiative.

• Connection status. https://api.zinndigital.com/v1/connector/status reports whether this
  site’s pairing is still live, for the connection state shown on the plugin’s own screen.

Translations

Every string this plugin adds to your admin is translated into 57 languages — labels, notices,
errors and settings, not a subset. The catalogues are bundled in the plugin, so they work as soon
as you set your site language; there is no separate language pack to install.

They are bundled rather than left to translate.wordpress.org because that service can only offer
the languages volunteers have got to, and Zinn Digital® sells its platform in all 57 of these — a
customer whose site is in Amharic or Khmer would otherwise read an English admin screen
indefinitely. A community translation is always preferred where one exists: WordPress loads a
language pack ahead of a bundled catalogue, so contributing on translate.wordpress.org replaces
ours rather than competing with it.

Every user-visible string is complete in each of the 53 languages WordPress can serve today:

Amharic (am), Arabic (ar), Azerbaijani (az), Bulgarian (bg_BG), Bengali (Bangladesh)
(bn_BD), Czech (cs_CZ), German (de_DE), Greek (el), Spanish (Spain) (es_ES), Persian
(fa_IR), French (France) (fr_FR), Gujarati (gu), Hebrew (he_IL), Hindi (hi_IN), Croatian
(hr), Hungarian (hu_HU), Armenian (hy), Indonesian (id_ID), Italian (it_IT), Japanese
(ja), Georgian (ka_GE), Kazakh (kk), Khmer (km), Kannada (kn), Korean (ko_KR), Lao (lo),
Malayalam (ml_IN), Mongolian (mn), Marathi (mr), Malay (ms_MY), Myanmar (Burmese)
(my_MM), Nepali (ne_NP), Dutch (nl_NL), Panjabi (India) (pa_IN), Polish (pl_PL), Pashto
(ps), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt_BR), Romanian (ro_RO), Russian (ru_RU), Sinhala (si_LK),
Albanian (sq), Serbian (sr_RS), Swahili (sw), Tamil (ta_IN), Telugu (te), Thai (th),
Tagalog (tl), Turkish (tr_TR), Ukrainian (uk), Urdu (ur), Uzbek (uz_UZ), Vietnamese
(vi), Chinese (China) (zh_CN)

A further 4 ship complete in the plugin — Hausa (ha), Somali (so_SO), Tajik (tg), Yoruba (yo) — but
WordPress core does not currently provide a locale for them, so WordPress cannot load them.

Right-to-left

Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Pashto and Urdu are right-to-left. Every screen this plugin adds was
rendered in a real WordPress install in each of those languages and checked, not assumed.

For translators

languages/ holds the `.pot` template plus a `.po`, `.mo` and `.l10n.php` for every language, so

corrections and new languages can be contributed directly.