Why a Wix site's blog is the only part an AI can reach
On a Wix site, an assistant can reach the blog and almost nothing else. That is not a limit of our software or of the key you give it: Wix has no Pages permission in its own permission catalogue and no site-structure API behind one, so a Wix page, its menu and its navigation cannot be created or changed by anything outside the Wix editor. The blog is a different story — posts, categories, SEO fields, scheduling and media all work, and we have run every one of them against a real Wix site.
·
We found this out the way you should find things out: by opening the API key form on a real Wix account and reading the whole permission catalogue, rather than by reading Wix's marketing pages. A permission that is not in that list is a thing no key can be given, however it is worded in a support article.
What a Wix key can be given
An account-level API key is made in your Wix account settings, and the form asks for a name, which sites the key may reach, and a list of permissions. These four are the ones that decide what an assistant can do.
- Wix Blog — posts and categories: create, update, publish.
- Manage Site Media — the site's files and folders.
- SEO — the site's SEO settings, and the redirects that ride along with them.
- Read Members — which sounds unrelated and is not optional: Wix will not accept a change to a post without naming the post's owner.
There is no fifth entry for pages. There is no entry for menus. The catalogue is the whole of what Wix will let an outside integration do, and those two are not in it — so the honest sentence is that Wix, as far as anything outside its editor can tell, is a blog rather than a content management system. Somebody buying this to look after a Wix *site* would find most of their site untouchable. Somebody buying it to look after a Wix *blog* gets the whole thing.
What our Wix adapter will attempt
12 of 14, which is joint highest on the whole catalogue — and all 12 of them are inside the blog. The two lists below come from the adapter when this page loads.
What Wix lets us ask for
-
Read content
-
Create content
-
Edit content
-
Publish content
-
Schedule content
-
Manage images and files
-
Manage categories and tags
-
Edit SEO information
-
Custom content types
-
Site information
-
Manage redirects
-
Administrative information
What Wix has no way to do
-
Manage menus
-
Bulk changes
Both lists are generated from that platform's adapter when the page loads, so they are what the software will attempt rather than what we would like to say. Bulk work is the one row that is empty for every platform: no adapter claims it yet, and the automation page says so too.
What we ran against a real Wix site
A key was made with those four permissions and pointed at a real site. Eleven of its fourteen rows came back verified, two limited and one unsupported, each recorded with the date it was checked. This is the part of the post nobody can copy from a documentation page.
| What we asked for | What came back |
|---|---|
| Read the site's own information | Name, version, the lot. |
| List posts, then read one in full | Three listed, one read. |
| Create a draft, edit it, publish it, put it back | All four. It arrived as a draft rather than public, which is what we needed to prove. |
| Write an SEO title and description | Read, then written, onto our own draft. |
| Upload an image, then describe it | Uploaded. Alt text refused — Wix keeps none on a file. Limited, and the limit is named. |
| Add a redirect, as a temporary one | Listing worked; a 302 refused. Wix only makes permanent ones. Limited, and nothing was changed. |
Three Wix-shaped things worth knowing
Each of these cost us a bug, and each of them will cost you an afternoon if you are building something of your own against Wix.
- The Blog app has to be opened once before it exists. On a site that has never been designed, adding Blog from the App Market is not enough — "Add to Site" leaves it waiting in the editor, and until somebody opens the blog from the dashboard every blog endpoint answers 401. We told customers their key had been revoked and to make another, which is the one thing Wix only lets you do once.
- A Wix key's permissions cannot be changed after it is made. Tick the wrong boxes and the only remedy is to throw the key away and make another. This is why our setup page names the exact boxes and why it is the longest setup of any platform we support.
- Alt text belongs to the place the picture is used, not to the picture. The same photograph on two pages can mean two things, so Wix keeps no description on the file. Ask us to set the alt text on a post's cover image and we can; anywhere else it is set in the editor where you placed it.
Who this is right for, and who it is not
If your Wix site's content is its blog — which is true of a great many of them — then everything you would want an assistant for is available, and Wix is one of the two most capable platforms on our list. If what you want is for an assistant to restructure your site, rewrite your home page or tidy your menus, Wix cannot do it and nor can anybody else selling you a Wix integration. We would rather tell you that on a page you can find in a search than after you have paid.
Honest limit: the eleven verified, two limited and one unsupported above were recorded against one real Wix site with a key holding those permissions. A Wix key's permissions are chosen per key, so two customers' keys do not grant the same things — our adapter works out what a given key can actually do by probing at connection time rather than assuming, and tells you what it found.
Questions we get asked about this
- Can an assistant edit my Wix home page?
- No, and neither can anything else outside the Wix editor. There is no pages API. Your home page is edited in Wix, by you.
- Why does it need to read my members?
- Because Wix refuses a change to a blog post that does not name the post's owner, whatever is being changed. We read the owner off the post being edited, so editing somebody else's post leaves it theirs.
- Does my Wix site have to be published first?
- No. Drafts, categories and SEO fields all work on a site with no public address yet. Two of Wix's own endpoints do go quiet until a site is published, which is why neither of them is how we check that a key works.