how price comparison websites works? and how to get data? - php

So I have this project in mind,
Price comparator for car rental companies, in my country!
the problem that I am facing right now the majority of this enterprises don't have online rental services or an API that I could pull up the data from, I wanna do something like carrentals.com, search for the location and rent date and the drop off date and search the available cars to rent.
now my main question is that I don't know how I'll get the data, do i need to go to every rental service in my city to get their data or there is something else that i could do!?

You can consider top 5 websites in your city, and create a web crawler for them. It would basically be scraping data off their websites. That's what I would've done.
Every website changes it designs sometime so you would have to cater your web crawler according to their design. I had a similar task once and had to create a web crawler for most used websites for their products, similar products, brands and prices. Hope i helped.

Related

WordPress Multisite Geolocation Subdomain

There are other questions on this, but none seem to fit my user case.
I have two instances of a website, both are in English but using WordPress Multisite there is European version and an American version of the site.
This was set up by a predecessor, but I am trying to find an alternative to WordPress Multisite because most of the posts (~75%) belong on both Europe and America versions, and I don't want the content creators to have to worry about logging in to two dashboards and posting the same post twice.
This really doesn't have to be a WordPress specific question, I am just wondering how typical networking is done for a job like this where:
1). Theme is to remain the same
2). Posts are mostly the same and it would be nice if there was just one dashboard and plugin/function on a post to say publish for Europe, America, or both.
3). Users would have to opt-in to join the Europe site if they were already on the America site, but they wouldn't have to re-register, kind of like how users can join across the StackOverflow network.
I think I know how to do this if I were to write my own little CMS using another PHP or Node framework, it would just be a property of the various posts as to what geo they were published for and similarly each user would say what geo they were registered for, and then when querying the database from a given subdomain I would query for posts by the geo attached to that subdomain, as a kind of constant in the query.
Given I have WordPress install, what is the easiest way to accomplish such goals in WordPress or do I need my own solution? Also how do sites like StackOverflow manage users across various networks?
Furthermore if I wanted to accomplish this in a more do-it-yourself framework like Laravel, what are some of the general principles in order to accomplish this and not manage two sites but leverage something like Cloudlfare to point to subdomains based on gelocation and serve the same site but with different database queries?
I don't even understand why you would need a multisite setup for this. All you are trying to do is organise content, and within Wordpress you do that with taxonomies.
You can use the built in ones like categories or tags or you can create your own. Customise default settings based on geo ip information, or a user setting, or just lets users pick or whatever you want.
You can set it up so users to have to opt in to read posts tagged from across the pond, or just set their default to show local posts but give them a link to view all, or again just put a setting in their admin section.
Build your own CMS if you want, but seems like a real waste of time when this is pretty much exactly what Wordpress was designed for and they probably have 50,000+ developer hours headstart on you.

Using Magento as a standard website at first?

I have an e-commerce web project for a convience store. I have been researching for a good e-commerce CMS and am pretty convinced that Magento is a good one and i'll be probably considering it.
The project is to be divided into two phases where first the client needs a simple website with forms to gather delivery information and careers forms, along with data reprensentstion in a good UI such as accordion and specific html5 designs. The website shall be responsive.
The other phase (after few months) will be the e-commerce part where the client wants to sell products online and make deals and coupons and gather some specific type of data such as most selling products and so.
I havent used Magento before and am afraid i wont meet my deadline if i get to learn Magento and try to develop the site in this short period of time (1 month for the first phase of project) thats why i have some questions:
Can I drop some of the running features of Magento such as sales and shopping cart and online payment...etc for the first phase where i need to only make a standard website?
How easy is it to add custom html and custom database tables and view user specif data other than products and pricing (image galleries, UI accordions, social media widgets and integrations...)?
How easy is it to maintain responsive content within the Magento CMS while adding custom modifications?
Thanks alot.
Magento is a very complex, e-commerce first system.
It has a very high learning curve and doesn't offer feature rich content management features (all it has is simple CMS pages and blocks).
For e-commerce, Magento is very good, however it requires a lot of knowledge to work with. Since you're on a 1-month timeframe with no Magento experience, I would not recommend it. Go with something you're comfortable with, then work from there.
You can always combine two systems (Wordpress + Magento for example) later on to make a website that has both extensive content management AND e-commerce capabilities.

cakephp application design query

I am really a new bee in cakephp development. I've got a design question and would like to get some ideas.
The web application is for a big corporation and each child companies underneath is exactly the same. one child company can not see data from another child company. so at this stage my query is should I build build separate replicated apps, each represent one child company. if so then data aggregation would be a big job in terms of running overall reports. the other option is to build one big application and display/hide data based on the user logged in (user and location of the company).
the next big problem is within each small company there are different units and only certain data is visible across. for example publication department can see customer details but not customer's order history details. from each company one admin user have a right to see all the details. its like each business unit represent a module with certain data visibility. I know cake has fantastic authentication module to handle this but what I need to know is should I put authentication based on controller level or action level? so then each business unit = one big controller
hope this description will give you some sort of vague idea of what i am trying to build.
thanks in advance
You can use ACL.Take a look here ACL tutorial or use a plugin like Alaxos Plugin

How does a site that finds the best price among many eshops work ? Like pricegrabber

I saw a website http://www.pricegrabber.com/nokia/products.html/form_keyword=nokia/st=query/sv=findit_top/ that finds the cheaper/best price of a product among many eshops. Their system searches through their database (I guess they are using XML) and displays all shops that have the product sorted by price.
I believe that their search function looks over a united XML of all the shops. But my question is, isn't supposed all those eshops that include in the site, should have the same XML structure? How do they manage to do it ?
If my idea is wrong please tell me how does this can work.
Often, the sites being compared willingly offer up their prices to the comparison site (via an API, webservice etc.) rather than getting scraped against their will.
From their perspective, anything that draws some extra visibility is a good thing. They normally pay the comparison site a small affiliate fee for every sale/customer that is referred to them as well.
GoCompare, CompareTheMarket et. al. don't exist to be helpful out of their own good nature - they are getting a cut of profits and the sites they feature are complicit in providing them with the data.
The nice way is to get XML data from each shop and then group everything to display to the user. Since there is no standard format for this, your site must have a specific backend for each shop.
Each web sites submits a csv file with all their product information in the same format to pricegrabber. Pricegrabber then imports that data.
You can do the same by signing up a to an affiliate network and like CJ. Once you have an account you can download product data feeds from merchants that provide them. You will need to match up any item with the same SKU or by brand and MPN. Matching the same item to different merchants is the hard part.

Ecommerce application and solution

Here's my predicament. I'm working with a designer who has a very unique layout for his ecommerce site. It's kinda like a table/tier based system where you buy a certain amount of points. I need the ability to have user accounts etc and it will all be in joomla. There's many options such as magento, virtuamart etc. but basically what I'm saying is... will it be possible with any particular platform to transform the products so much so that can still use the platform? here's a screen shot...
http://www.one2designs.com/images/screen.png
Basically It needs to some way integrate into joomla, allow for user profiles etc, and I guess be so customizable that it can be transformed into that look.
Both Joomla and Virtuemart allow for 100% of customisation of the templates used. The process is simply:
Design
Cut and slice into HTML
Build Joomla template, product pages.
Further, the screenshot shows simply a list of 7 products, so either Table with 7 columns or a ul, li construct will work.
Is there anything else product wise you need to manage? It doesn't look like people will actually add more than 1 product to their "shopping cart", so a simple form manager like RSForm may achieve the same purpose. There are E-Commerce plugins for most newer form managers now and it should also not be too hard to link up third party payment gateways as a one off.
From the look of your image, that is simply a product with various options that are user selected. You would need to change the way the product options are displayed to fit the design, but other than the display, there is nothing unusual about a product with many options. Everything below the radio buttons is pretty much irrelevant as it is only option details. Virtuemart could be made to do this fairly easily.

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