Announcements / specific classified ads

  • Hi,

    I am a php developer, and more used to work with Frameworks rather than CMS, but we decided to work with WordPress for a new project ??

    This project is a website for a music association, and the part I’m working on is the page were musicians can look for groups and groups look for musicians. It’s sort of a craigslist specific to music, with fields that are specific to music and especially the music genre the association is dedicated to.

    The way I would have done it with a framework or with bare php is :

    1. Create a data model for groups / musicians posts (SQL tables)
    2. Create CRUDs (Form to create, read, update and delete these posts)
    3. Create a page listing the posts and letting users do basic search (simple sql queries) to find their perfect group/musician

    But I thought it would be smart to, first, ask the community if some steps of this work had already been done in open source or free pulgins, or if you guys had some advice about how to design such a page with wordpress.

    I think I should also tell you that I already spent few hours looking for free plugins but could not find anything that would suit my needs : regular user postsing custom content with custom fields, and model storing it in order to be queried easily. (some free pugins I looked : Advanced custom fields, Pods, Ninja forms, User submitted posts)

    Thank you in advance for you help !

    Adrien

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • You are welcome.

    Advanced custom fields plugin

    Is excellent, you might need the pro version to get the most out of it.

    I would think you should think not in terms of building one single page.

    Instead explore the concepts of WordPress custom fields and custom post types and custom taxonomies. Numerous references are available within https://codex.www.ads-software.com/ … If you create the objects according to codex best practice, WordPress will handle all the SQL for you.

    Also, I think a skilled php developer new to WordPress would benefit greatly by studying the WordPress loop. https://codex.www.ads-software.com/The_Loop

    Good luck

    Thread Starter DidiDev

    (@dididev)

    Hi Santaven,

    Thank you for your answer, I will read this documentation and learn more about the concepts you mentioned.

    About Advanced custom field plugin, It seemed to me that the way they are storing data is not ideal for querying, but I will definitely give it another try !

    I leave this topic open to other comments, and I’m sure I will come back from the doc with some questions related to this topic.

    ACF plugin stores data either as WordPress post-meta(= custom field) or WordPress options. A lot of folks do say, compared to some super-robust data structures, they are less than optimum. But this is the WordPress way, options, posts and post-meta , users and user-meta, are the primary data structures.

    The way I understand, some acf query functions are resource heavy, mostly just wrappers around the underlying native WordPress functions for simplicity to non-programmers. I typically use instead the native functions.

    Thread Starter DidiDev

    (@dididev)

    Hi,

    I read some pages from the codex, and based on this and your comments, I think I will develop a plugin as a separated code, and just link some render functions to shortcodes.

    I will do the DB management out of WP conventions, because what I saw the most in WP plugin was JSON stored as text and unserialized once retrieved… Which makes any querying on the specific fields impossible unless your DB engine is able to parse JSON data, which I do not think MySQL does (but I might be wrong).

    I think it’s only the options stored as serialized arrays, not the posts and post-meta.

    Before you go outside db conventions, be sure to check out class wpdb()

    Your own plugin (OO or mvc if you can) is definitely the way to keep your functionality separate from the core and from the theme which should be layout and structure only.

    I read again you looked at some form based stuff. Gravity forms is reasonable price paid premium plugin. Powerful and flexible enough to extend however you would want.

    I do a lot of sites with 3 “starter” plugins intertwined

    1. ACF
    2. Gravity Forms
    3. Justin Tadlock’s Members

    Seems you’re well onto it, I’ll be interested to know how it turns out.

    Cheers

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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