Live feeds and searchable databases

  • Hi,

    I am reviewing a brief from a potential client and want to make sure I can complete the site build as she has requested. The client has asked for extra functionality that I am not familiar with yet; can someone please advise where to start with this?

    1. Client requires a live weather feed on the site. Her words:”a live feed of our weather data that is transmitted hourly by satellite to an ftp site; the page would have to be custom and we hope created to have a similar feel to the rest of the site. This would require a mySQL server.”

    What needs to be done here? I am aware that there are live weather feed plugins but I believe she is asking for more here?

    2. Pages with searchable databases of images and text. Again, there are plugins for this that I have seen, or do I use custom post types?

    Thanks in advance

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Getting data from an FTP server is easy enough as long as you have the correct connection credentials and the correct URL to the data. I don’t see what an SQL server has to do with this unless the data is supposed to be saved there, maybe because the FTP data is volatile? In any case, WP also requires an SQL server, so that alone should not be an impediment.

    It sounds like you need to use their sat feed, so available weather plugins will probably not do, it sounds like a custom script is needed. Raw weather data is typically not human friendly, but it’s consistently structured, so parsing it into human friendly form shouldn’t be difficult, though you may need some sort of format specification to make sense of the data feed.

    As for searchable images, try to use a plugin if you can, it’ll save you development time. Images uploaded through the media library are related to the attachment post type, so another custom post type sounds unwarranted. All sorts of meta data could be added to any post. The WP_Query class has a fairly robust meta_query provision, so something should be able to be worked out.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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