Automating the submission of WordPress Blog Posts to your Microsoft MVP Community Activities Profile using PowerShell

Introduction

In November last year (2017) I was honored to be awarded Microsoft MVP Status for Enterprise Mobility – Identity and Access. MVP Status is awarded based on community activities and even once you’ve attained MVP Status you need to keep your community activity contributions updated on your profile.

Up until recently this was done by accessing the portal and updating your profile, however mid last year a MVP PowerShell Module (big thanks to Francois-Xavier Cat and Emin Atac) was released that allows for some automation.

In this post I’ll detail using the MVP PowerShell Module to retrieve your latest WordPress Blog Post and submit it to your MVP Profile as a MVP Community Contribution.

Prerequisites

In order for this to work you will need;

• to be a Microsoft MVP
• Register at the MS MVP API Developer Portal using your MVP registered email/profile address
  • subscribe to the MVP Production Application
  • copy your API key (you’ll need this in the script below)

The Script

Update the script below for;

• MVP API Key
  • Update Line 5 with your API key as detailed above
• WordPress Blog URL (mine is blog.darrenjrobinson.com)
  • Update Line 11 with your WP URL. $wordpressBlogURL = ‘https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1/sites//posts/?number=1’
• Your Award Category
  • Update Line 17 with your category $contributionTechnology = “Identity and Access”
  • type New-MVPContribution – ContributionTechnology and you’ll get a list of the MVP Award Categories

The Script

Here is the simple script. Run it after publishing a new entry you also want added to your Community Contributions Profile. No error handling, nothing complex, but you’re a MVP so you can plagiarize away for your submissions to make it do what suits your needs.

See the gist on github.

Summary

Hopefully that makes it simple to keep your MVP profile up to date. If you’re using a different Blogging platform I’m sure the basic process will work with a few tweaks after returning a query to get the content. Enjoy.