At Mashable, we did something similar, except we just used Sidekiq. We'd built a lot of functionality in Ruby, which included ActiveRecord classes for Wordpress

At Mashable, we did something similar, except we just used Sidekiq. We'd built a lot of functionality in Ruby, which included ActiveRecord classes for Wordpress tables (which makes working with Wordpress's table hierarchy actually sane, and it's insanely useful to be able to get to your DB as objects in a console), so we could interact with Wordpress directly. Actually queueing Sidekiq jobs is pretty trivial - you just need to be able to talk to Redis. Our frontend doesn't actually use Wordpress any more, which was vastly eased by this approach; being able to decouple the backend and frontend made it surprisingly easy to obviate the front-end portions of the product.