Creating a wordpress install bot and the like

[Lucidity]

I want to learn how to create scripts (in PHP) that can interact with websites like a human would, such as installing and configuring Wordpress or submitting something to a social site. I can do some basic scraping with cURL, but I'm not sure where to begin.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? What kinds of things are involved that I need to learn?

 

[nis]

You can do most things with curl.

Get the Firefox plugin LiveHTTPHeaders, so you can see what gets send between the browser and the webpage. Cookies, headers anything really. THen its semi-easy to replicate it with PHP/Curl.