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.
Related
I'm sure I'm doing this wrong, and that there's a better way of doing this.
I just finished making a food blog website. Posts are uploaded into a database. The HTML files are generated using the information from the SELECT statement, when they are needed.
Basically, I didn't think it was smart to create a new HTML file and store pages that way, but rather create them on the fly.
This is my (terrible) method:
User clicks on link or types URL
URL is structured like so: www.website.com/name-of-post
There is no HTML file called name-of-post.php so it redirects with a 404 error.
On that page I check to see if 'name of post' exists in the database.
If it does, generate the file. Else, show 404 error page.
This method also means that the pages aren't indexed by google, so people will not be able to search a recipe that way.
I know this can't be right. So is there a better way of doing this?
Well, you just discovered the reason PHP was invented 20 years ago. It's a templating engine that allows you to dynamically generate web pages.
Storing content in your database is generally fine. Most content is just data. However, building a web page using that content is an entirely different matter. There's neither a need to generate an actual .html file on your filesystem nor a need to store an .html file (in its entirety) in your database to do so.
The concept of templating in PHP is that you create the format separate from the content, such that the format can always be changed, and the content can always be plugged in regardless.
For example, here's a very simple template.
<h1>Hello <?=$name?></h1>
<p>Today is <?=date('l F jS, Y')?>.</p>
The format of this page will always be the same, regardless of the content, which are the variables that we could easily plug into the template from our database. Your problem is no different. You can store templates, written as simple HTML and PHP code that just plug-in the content with some variables (likely populated by the data in your database).
The concept of dynamically creating URLs is relatively similar. You can tell your web server to redirect all requests to a main PHP script (typically referred to as a front-controller) like your index.php, and have that script check the database for the request URI (using something like $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], for example) and based on that information you can pull in the needed content from your database, use the template to generate the output, and out comes the page for the client.
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.
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.
Let me know if this question needs more clarification.
I am a front-end developer, and I usually use Wordpress with lots of custom fields to put together a CMS for clients.
A current client wants a design portfolio site that initially presents a grid of images that link to projects, but instead of loading a new page on click, the new content loads and fades in smoothly.
I figure the simplest way to do this kind of thing is to load everything up front on one page with ajax (a loading screen is OK), and then just show/hide/move content with jQuery.
The request I am having trouble with is being able to have specific URL's for different projects and images. The client wants a URL scheme like here:
http://collins1.com/work/bp-helios-house/3
Where the number at the end causes a specific image to load in the given project. It seems like this would be simple enough using php variables where like:
http://www.whatever.com?project=3&image=2
And using those to manipulate the initial AJAX load.
But how is this accomplished using a more traditional (pretty) URL structure like the example? If I am building the site as one page loading content, won't the browser attempt to load that as a page and just come up with a 404?
Bonus: How do you change the URL in the address bar to create these links as the user navigates the site without reloading the page?
Thanks!
what you see there, is called url routing. Basically, some server rule that rewrites the url in a proper way, depending on server and scripting language used.
for example, the url
http://server.com/foo/bar
MAY be redirected to
http://server.com/index.php?foo=bar
If you need a lightweight framework to handle this, take a look at www.slimframework.com
If you want real pretty urls you are going to need a server-side framework for url routing and will require you to get into php or ruby on rails. If you want a pure front end solution you can fake it in javascript using hash fragments. For how to do this see
http://backbonejs.org/#Router
http://www.asual.com/jquery/address/
http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-hashchange-plugin/
Now I have my website built on PHP & Mysql. Consider this like a forum. Now when a user posts a reply in my website 1 (ex. www.website1.com), I want to be able to show the starting thread and it's related replies in a sister website of mine. I want to do this in a way that it does not show the rest of the page & other page contents (like logo etc.). I don't think iframe would be a solution because an iframe would embed the whole page and the users visiting my sister website (totally different domain i.e. www.website2.com) would be able to see all the page contents, like logo etc. I want to avoid that. I want to make them see only limited information from website 1 and only the info. that I intend.
I hope that makes sense. In a way, you could say that I am trying to replicate my 1 website, and show only a limited part of it. Users browsing 2nd website can post a reply in the 2nd website and it should automatically be posted & visible to the visitors of the website 1. Users of website 1 should not know that a user of website 2 has posted it. They would feel that some user from website 1 has posted it. Do I have to use 2 separate mysql DB or just 1? I think it would be problematic if I am trying to use different DB. I also feel I might have to face DB connectivity issues as I can connect to only 1 DB at a time.
It's basically like users of website1.com should feel that they are replying to users of website1.com & users of website2.com should feel that they are replying to users of website2.com. (I need it this way to bridge the gap between them). At the same time I want to make the front end of the websites different so that they don't feel that they are replying to some other users outside the domain. These websites would be under my control and I will have access to the source code at any time. If I need to change the source code, these changes are welcome.
Is this really possible?
Thank you in advance.
I'd recommend generating RSS (might be runtime) and using it on the sister website. If RSS is not suitable for your needs, you can create your own XML-based format (or any other :) )
Make two forums which use one database. Both websites would put new messages in the same database.
Make an API for website1, so that website2 can retrieve and post messages on the forum. Website2 would do a HTTP request to website1, which returns XML or JSON, so that website2 can request a list of posts that it can display.
Have both sites connect to the same database and display the content they pull in whatever way is appropriate for the particular site. Each site can only pull the fields relevant to that site.
If the idea is to have two websites with the same data but different presentations, then you would want to simply share a single database between them - assuming they are hosted in the same place and can both get at the database.
You can then just create different PHP pages that both access the same database in the same way but display the data differently.
The best way to do this would be to have a shared library of functions or classes that both sites use to manipulate the data. You would then build a different "presentation layer" on top of that for each site.