I have a website made with WP (a customer passed me). He want to see in one of the pages, a list of product categories, and to get the list of this product categories, I have to send a request to an API in another website. The site will response with an XML that contain the categories. To make the request I will use some PHP library. After the response is arrived, I want to show those categories in the page of my site of my customer.
I have followed the first answer here to call a php file before rendering a template, but imagine that I want to pass a variable (product categories) from the php to to the template. How can I do that?
You will probably want to cache the results of the XML that comes back to you (unless it is truely dynamic), and possibly store it in a table. You can decide how often you need to refresh the cache. (This will protect your site and their API from DOS attacks, or even just high volume).
Once you have your data stored in a table, your template can simply retrieve it.
This pattern will reduce the coupling between the two parts of your solution, and make things a bit easier to build / debug.
Related
I have to add the custom Post id for the custom post type. can anyone help me?
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This is a work around that works.
Background info:
We maintain a few almost identical web pages with different branding. The code repo is shared across these. The developers hard coded page IDs into the PHP in the past. I was asked to add new pages. After adding new pages on each website, I noticed the IDs were all randomly generated. This was breaking PHP code's logic. So, I needed to edit these IDs just like OP.
The work around:
In WP web admin page, there's an export / import functionality under tools menu. The new pages should be created in one site, then exported / imported onto other websites. This way, page IDs don't get created randomly. It copies the IDs from the exported page. So you can have same IDs on all pages.
PS:
Not sure why the past developers decided to hard-code page IDs in the code. This shouldn't have been the case to start with. When you don't have much time to refactor everything, stack overflow always comes to help.
IDs determine post record storage in database, changing them directly would be highly prone to breaking things. For example extensions often store IDs as a way to refer to specific post and do something with it.
The simple way to change to some ID would be to just create a new post and copy data over (through admin or with code either).
Post ID of a post also reflect in tables other than Post table, like post comments table. Changing post ID will disturb the relationship of post table with other tables, so it is not advisable.
What I am trying to do is to make something similar to what I see all the time on almost any website. The button that says Share to facebook. The goal for me is to let my guests share the item they are viewing in my store (Ran on prestashop) on their blog I run (Running on Oxwall).
The goal is for the button to not only link to a blog post submission webpage but to already have the subject line filled out with the item they are sharing's name and the blog post to display the information about the item. I would like to try and do all this using PHP. I am not sure how to go about doing it but I am sure that I could pass the value. Please note that I can mod BOTH the blog site and the shop as I run both and want to connect them.
As an extra bonus I am also running a forum using phpbb3 if I could do the same thing but onto that as well I would greatly thank you. I am trying to interlink everything into one big network. I know its not an easy task but I am sure there is an easy way to pass data onto the other site so that this can be done.
Facebook a 2 tools to get items informations in the page, it parses the page looking for the most common tags and it uses OpenGraph.
You can also provide product informations in the head of your page (between head tags), then blog side, you retrieve only the contents and parse it as XML.
I advise you to cache this data to avoid useless connections between websites and awful overloads while parsing.
You can use your own specifications, Open Graph or another standard, but i advise to use a standard.
I've been tasked with providing the backend for a news feed that will be used by our company apps. The feed will pull articles from our current website, which is built with ModX (evolution). So far, I've designed the feed to send JSON through a specified url containing the needed information. It's currently in the following format (using Ditto placeholders):
{
"title":"[+longtitle+]",
"description":"[+description+]",
"link":"[(site_url)][~[+id+]~]"
},
Here's my issue - the link I'm providing through the JSON (in the link tag) opens the full, desktop version of the page. Our current site is not responsive, and was not originally designed to handle mobile devices. We would like to open a small, clean page showing ONLY the ['content'] of that particular article. I'm looking for a way to link to a page showing only this content - no header, no footer, nothing.
I know that I could create a new page to handle all of this, but it needs to be dynamic. New articles are created regularly, and I'd like to avoid having to add another page to handle this for every article, while also making it simple for the writing team to integrate this feature.
One of my ideas so far is:
Pass a GET parameter to the URL "link" in the JSON - something like - www.mysite.com/article1?contentOnly=true. Then, in my article, detect this parameter in PHP and handle accordingly. I would need this snippet on each article written, so it may cause issues down the road if our staff writers forget to add it.
I haven't worked with ModX long, so I'm assuming there's a better way to handle this. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if I need to provide more information.
I am not 100 % sure how you have done this, but here's my tip.
Don't use the resource itself to output the JSON. Doing this based on a GET-paramter will required the entire site to be uncached. Instead, use a single resource for the feed and supply the id/permalink there.
For example: mysite.com/feed?id=1, mysite.com/feed?latest or something like that.
Done this way, you could have an empty template with just the snippet that is parsing to JSON in it. This has to be uncached of course, but the rest of the site could be cached as normal.
I have a website live cricket scores , in which dynamically i am controlling the news section.
I have my own custom build CMS system with PHP, where admin will add the news to the web portal.
If i generate the Sitemap, all dynamically created pages wont be added to the sitemap,
is this a good practice or do we need to add the dynamically created links in sitemap?
if yes, can you please share how we can add dynamic links?
One more observation, I have made, whatever the news which is added getting cached within 4 Hrs in google.
Please share your thoughts, thanks in advance
If the pages are important, then you should add them to the site map so they can be indexed for future reference. However, if the pages are going to disappear after the match, then I wouldn't put them on the site map as they may get indexed then disappear, which may have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.
You can add these dynamic pages to a site map in a couple of ways:
Whenever a new dynamic page is created, re-create your site map. Do this by looking through the database for the pages which will be valid and writing them out into an XML site map file.
When a new page is created, read the current XML site map, and insert a new entry into the relevant place.
I would say the easiest option is option 1 as you can quickly and easily build a site map without having to read what you already have. That option also means that when you remove a one of the dynamic pages, it will be removed from the site map when it is re-built without the need to read through what you have, find the entry and remove it.
Google code has a number of different options for you, some of which you can download and run, others look like they need implementing within your own code.
Yes, if these pages content needs to be referenced by search engines, of course they have to be in sitemap.
I worked on a lot of ebusiness website and of course, almost 99% of pages where dynamically generated, almost 1000 product pages versus the 3 sales conditions & legal static pages.
So the sitemap itself was dynamic and regenerated every 15 minutes (to avoid dumping the whole product base each and running thousands of queries each tim the sitemap is called).
You can use a sort of separate script to do this : I would do one static part template if you have static page, and one other embedding the dynamically generated urls.
It would be easier if you CMS already embed url management (or routing) system.
How can I make it so that content from a database is available to search engines, like google, for indexing?
Example:
Table in mysql has a field named 'Headline' which equals 'BMW M3 2005'.
My site name is 'MySite'
User enters 'BMW M3 2005 MySite' in google and the record will show up with results?
Google indexes web pages, so you will need to have a page for each of your records, this doesn't mean to say you need to create 1,000 HTML pages, but following my advice above will dynamically / easily provide a seemingly unique page for each product.
For example:
www.mydomain.com/buy/123/nice-bmw-m3-2005
You can use .htaccess to change this link to:
www.mydomain.com/product.php?id=123
Within this script you can dynamically create each page with up-to-date information by querying your database based on the product id in this case 123.
Your script will provide each record with it's own title ('Nice BMW M3 2005'), a nice friendly URL ('www.mydomain.com/buy/123/nice-bmw-m3-2006') and you can include the correct meta information too, as well as images, reviews etc etc.
Job done, and you don't have to create hundreds of static HTML pages.
For more information on .htaccess, check out this tutorial.
What ILMV is trying to explain is that you have to have HTML pages that Google and other search engines can 'crawl' in order for them to index your content.
Since your information is loading dynamically from a database, you will need to use a server-side language like PHP to dynamically load information from the database and then output that information to an HTML page.
You have any number of options for how to accomplish this specifically, ILMV's suggestion is one of the better ways though.
Basically what you need to do first is figure out how to pull the information from the database and then use PHP (or another server-side language) to output the information to an HTML page.
Then you will need to determine whether you want to use the uglier, default url style for php driven pages:
mysite.com/products.php?id=123
But this url is not very user or search engine friendly and will result in your content not being indexed very well.
Or you can use some sort of URL rewriting mechanism (mod_rewrite in a .htaccess file does this or you can look at more complex PHP oriented solutions like Zend Framework that provide what's called a Front Controller to handle mapping of all requests) to make it so that your url's look like:
mysite.com/products/123/nice-bmw-m3-2006
This is what ILMV is talking about with regard to url masking.
Using this method of dynamically loading content will allow you to develop a single page to load the information for a number of different products based on the Id thus making it seem to the various search engines as though you have a unique page for each product.