Daily News Digest Videos: WordPress → YouTube Shorts (Shotstack)

Turn WordPress news into daily YouTube Shorts—automatically

This n8n workflow creates and publishes a professionally formatted Daily News Digest from your WordPress posts—then delivers it as YouTube Shorts (1080×1920). Every evening at 7:00 PM, it compiles today’s top stories into a vertical video optimized for social media, using Shotstack for video generation.

What this workflow does

• Runs on a schedule: automatically triggers every day at 19:00 (7 PM).
• Fetches today’s articles: retrieves all published WordPress posts from the current day.
• Validates content: proceeds only when there are at least 3 articles.
• Detects embedded video content: scans each article’s HTML for embedded MP4 URLs (including parsing wp-playlist-script JSON), with fallbacks to <video> and <source> tags.
• Processes article data: extracts titles, links, and featured media IDs; decodes HTML entities (e.g., ", –); pulls featured images via the WordPress Media API; assigns default images when needed.
• Prepares on-screen timing: calculates reading time per article (about 3–7 seconds) and cleans text by removing HTML and normalizing whitespace.
• Generates the vertical digest: creates the Shotstack video (including an intro slide) and publishes it as a YouTube Shorts-ready format.

Use cases

• News portal and content teams that want a daily Shorts recap from existing WordPress publishing.
• SaaS operators automating social distribution without manual editing.
• n8n users building a repeatable pipeline from WordPress → video rendering (Shotstack) → YouTube Shorts.

Technical details

• Schedule trigger: runs daily at 19:00
• Nodes/logic: if, set, code, wait, merge, you tube
• Video rendering: Shotstack API for 1080×1920 vertical output
• WordPress integrations: fetches posts and pulls featured images via WordPress Media API