WP Portal Bridge

Keep WordPress as your backend. Upgrade the website your customers actually see.

WP Portal Bridge exposes your WordPress content as a signed, versioned Portal content contract so the Portal framework can render your public site — lean, fast, modern, cacheable, SEO-safe — while your team keeps the WordPress admin they already know.

WordPress Admin
  ↓
WP Portal Bridge Plugin
  ↓
HMAC-secured Portal Content Contract API
  ↓
Portal Source Adapter (@interchained/portal-source-wordpress)
  ↓
Portal Renderer
  ↓
Fast public website

WordPress owns content editing. Portal owns rendering, routing, layout, performance, deployment, caching, and public UX.

This is not an exporter. Not React-inside-WordPress. Not a migration tool. It is the secure contract layer between a WordPress backend and a Portal frontend.

How it works

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. WordPress Admin → Portal Bridge → Connect Portal Frontend — generates your PORTAL_TMK (Tunnel Master Key) and shows it once.
3. Copy the env block into your Portal deployment:

PORTAL_BRIDGE_BASE_URL=https://cms.example.com
PORTAL_TMK=portal_tmk_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

4. Portal detects the env, enables the WordPress source adapter, and renders your public site from WordPress-backed content.
5. Your client keeps editing pages, posts, media, menus, and SEO in WordPress. The public site is Portal.

What the contract carries

• Routes — pages, posts, and public custom post types, with paths preserved exactly as WordPress generates them. Authority preservation beats pretty route redesign.
• Content — rendered WordPress HTML (shortcodes and blocks resolved), plus plain text. Block-level normalization is a future slice.
• SEO — title, meta description, canonical, Open Graph, Twitter, robots — extracted from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or AIOSEO, with WordPress-core fallbacks for every field.
• Menus — registered menus with items, hierarchy, and internal/external classification.
• Media — featured images and assets referenced by published content (dimensions, alt text, captions).
• Taxonomies — categories, tags, and public custom taxonomies.
• Sitemap data — honest lastmod from real modification timestamps. Portal renders the XML.
• Snapshot — the full contract in one envelope with snapshotId, contentHash, routeCount, generatedAt, and chunked pagination for large sites.

What never leaks

Drafts. Private posts. Password-protected content. Media attached only to private content. Author emails. Admin-only metadata. Published-only, always.

The secure tunnel

Server-to-server HMAC. No bearer tokens, no cookies, no secrets in URLs, nothing exposed to the browser.

Every request Portal makes is signed with PORTAL_TMK (PORTAL-BRIDGE-V1):

canonical = "PORTAL-BRIDGE-V1" \n METHOD \n PATH_WITH_QUERY \n TIMESTAMP \n NONCE \n BODY_SHA256
signature = hex(hmac_sha256(PORTAL_TMK, canonical))

• PATH_WITH_QUERY is the raw request target exactly as sent — verified against REQUEST_URI with no re-encoding or re-ordering on either side.
• Bodyless requests hash the empty string.
• Timestamps must be within ±300s (configurable). Nonces are single-use inside a 10-minute replay window.
• Key rotation keeps the previous key valid for a configurable grace window, so deployed Portals never break mid-rotation. New signatures always use the current key.
• Failed attempts are rate-limited per IP and answered with a generic 401 — the precise reason is only visible in the admin's internal fail log.
• Responses are signed too (PORTAL-BRIDGE-RESPONSE-V1, bound to the request nonce), so Portal can verify integrity end to end.

Both implementations — this plugin (PHP) and the Portal adapter (TypeScript) — are asserted against the same golden vectors (tests/vectors/hmac-vectors.json). If either drifts, its test suite fails.

Endpoints

All under /wp-json/wp-portal-bridge/v1/, all signed-only by default:

Admin screen

WordPress Admin → Portal Bridge: connection status, tunnel status, TMK generate/rotate with one-time reveal, copy-paste Portal env block, snapshot state + content hash, route preview, loop-back Test Signed Request (signs a request to its own health endpoint through the real HTTP stack), failed-attempt log, tunnel settings.

Requirements

• WordPress ≥ 6.0, PHP ≥ 7.4
• Pretty permalinks recommended (the Portal adapter derives /wp-json/... endpoint paths)
• PORTAL_BRIDGE_BASE_URL must be the canonical origin — redirects break signatures by design

Development

# Regenerate golden vectors (canonical algorithm definition)
node tools/generate-vectors.mjs

# PHP conformance against the vectors (no WordPress needed)
php tests/test-auth-vectors.php

# Full security matrix against a live install
WPB_BASE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8080 WPB_TMK=... WPB_KEY_ID=... \
  node tests/integration/run-security-tests.mjs --draft-path /some-draft/

Roadmap (designed-for, not yet built)

Route remapping UI · redirect generators · SEO parity auditor · Gutenberg block translation · webhook cache invalidation · NEDB snapshot ledger (versioned, tamper-evident, replayable content snapshots) · migration/export mode · agency multi-site mode · local SEO classifier · schema builder.

License

GPLv2 or later. © Interchained LLC.

Portal framework adapter: @interchained/portal-source-wordpress.