Database plugin for WordPress

Thanks D, I’ve got it working fine now. Can you just have a quick read of what I’m doing and let me know if it all sounds kinda right?

I’m using WP as a CMS rather than a blog, so I’m creating pages, not posts. I’ve gone into the Page editor for the page that I want the table to appear on, and inserted the php code to display the table: insert_ext_db_table().

I’ve also edited the plugin to change the headings to what I want, and I’ve changed the code that displays column3 and column4 because I want them to show the text that’s contained in those cols rather than the icons that were being shown (just commented out the code that was there and copied & modified the line that shows column2).

All this is working great. But I’m wondering now what happens if/when there’s an update to the plugin… what will happen to the changes I’ve made?

Thanks so much for your help!

Your welcome – you just caught me on an “online” day (I’m usually not this quick to respond.)

Sounds like you got the hang of it.

I guess the word “plugin” makes it sound a little tooo simple ?? — Bear in mind that I worked this up as a “guideline” or “framework” for someone interested in doing what I struggled (at first) to do.

Since it doesn’t add any standard “plug-and-play” type functionality, and MUST be customized extensively, easy updates are fairly impossible. (Already, this is an extremely stripped down version of what I am using on my sites, each one different, that gives you some idea of what is possible.)

Add to that the fact that the code is fairly “bullet-proof” in that it uses simple php and mySQL practices and doesn’t rely on any WP specific code, it won’t need updating with WP changes.

Any hints on how to get the search functionality in your example https://www.ecologicalevolution.org/publications/

Johnny –

The scripts came as part of package written by Mark Schenk for Jabref ( https://www.markschenk.com/tools/jabref/index.html ) and are used under the Creative Commons attribution license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ –which allows you to use, modify and share, as long as you pay attribution back to the original author (as you can see I have done at the bottom of that page.)

I have excised the scripts and uploaded here: https://lbell270.com/files/pub-scripts.zip which you can possibly bend to your will. I was lucky in that it did exactly what I needed “out of the box.”

Good luck.

Thanks for the file driftless. I’ll give it a go

Two suggestions:

1) Why not add tables to the WordPress database to get rid of the hacking element?

2) Then, you could upload (and update) this to the plugin repository.

Hi jpelker – Thanks for the ideas. Thats one way to do it, and has been done I think (there are other plugins for linking a new table in the WP DB). This was a project designed specifically to link to a completely different DB hosted in a different place interacting with different people from the main WP DB.

I am sure there are also ways that it could be more streamlined / plug-in-able to make it repository suited, but since its really just a template/skeleton for a very specific need, I don’t see making that a priority.

Cheers!