We created a custom glossary for a WordPress music arranging and production site using ChatGPT, the Glossary WordPress plugin, a text editor, and the WP All-Import Plugin.
Lately, there’s a lot in the press about AI generally, and ChatGPT in particular. As a content creator, I was intrigued by its labor-saving potential. After trying a few sample “Chats,” I was struck by its speed and power as a content creator.
As a proprietor of an online business, I’m acutely aware that our customers have a widely variable level of understanding of musical terms and industry jargon. It occurred to me that, rather than having to define terms in every article or page in which they appear, or spend time composing emails or talking on the phone or Zoom to explain our process and terms, why not kill 2 birds with one stone, and create a Glossary – ideally, one that could be displayed as tool tips for underlined terms, as well as a term-rich SEO and authority asset for the site.
Creating a glossary from memory, or even from existing sources, is a daunting task, given the necessity for coming up with tens – or hundreds – of terms and definitions. Scraping existing pages might be an option, but then, we would need to edit the database extensively so as not to steal original content. We also need to narrow the term set to match our particular niche.
ChatGPT AI Content Generation
The ChatGPT interface invites you to start a “Chat” (site prompt to start their creation engine) by entering a phrase of keywords.
I was amazed (but not surprised?) to find out that it would return a set of terms and definitions for a Glossary query.
I did a series of Chats with similar keyword sets:
- Music Arranging Glossary
- Music Production Glossary
- Music Notation Glossary etc.
I copied them all into a text editor (BBEdit), and changed the delimiters between term and definition from either “ – “ or “: “ as delimiters in the ChatGPT output to tab characters for CSV export.
Next, I pasted the list into Numbers (Mac), sorted it, and started editing, deleting terms not relevant to my site content, and adding other terms not returned by ChatGPT in its lists.
The next step required exporting the database as a CSV file for bulk upload to our WordPress installation.
Using Glossary on WordPress
We installed Glossary by Codeat, starting with the free version. The plugin creates a Glossary custom post type, along with settings to manage and style it. The free version has some important limitations – but the paid version is not expensive.
WP All Import
Next step was importing the database using WP All Import. The import process was intuitive and simple – select the Glossary custom post type and define the fields using the plugin interface.
There’s a couple places to exit and correct if the preview doesn’t look right. If WP All Import detects duplicate terms, it invites you to cancel, fix your database, and re-do the upload. On completion, all the terms were uploaded as individual Glossary posts, and an Archive of all the terms was created.
Styling Your Terms
The plugin detects terms in page and/or post content, giving options to link to the definition page, display as tooltip, or both.
In order to display just the first instance of a term (better for cleaner copy on the front end), upgrading to the paid version is required, which also grants design control over the appearance and behavior of the links and tooltips.
We got best results on all platforms by selecting Settings for Tooltips>Enable Tooltips on Terms, and selecting Tooltips Only. The definition pages are distracting, take the user off the page, and aren’t much to look at. The definitions fit neatly in the tooltip popups.
We selected green as a link color in the Customizer Tab>Tooltip Text Style Settings.
In Settings>Settings for Tooltip we chose “Line” in the dropdown, which looks clean on the page. The other options include padding and background color for the term, which looks messy on the page. The plugin wraps the “Line” style in a css class, which enables control over the underline, which we chose to remove.
How the Glossary Tooltip displays on mouse -over or touch, styled to my own preference
A really powerful feature of the paid version of the plugin is shortcode support for creating a glossary index, or complete archive, via a configurable shortcode to enable or disable elements, including term links and definition content. They were very helpful in enabling me to discover these features.
The result is here:
https://arrangerforhire.com/music-arranging-and-production-glossary/
