Plugin to create a searchable database?

  • I’m currently designing a lab site in which the lab director wants to include a database (already stored in an Excel spreadsheet)of lab protocols. It needs to be searchable also as lab members would access this database to find specific protocols to use in their research.

    I’m looking at Inventory Manager which allows me to import the existing database, but it’s just not customizable enough (i.e. custom fields, layout, etc.) for my purposes.

    Anyone know of an appropriate plugin or of a way to accomplish this?

    Thanks!

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  • Writing search forms is difficult… usually searches are one-offs that require some custom coding to get the results you want. Leveraging WordPress’ taxonomies (tags and categories) is a big time-saver here… you can spend 10% of the time to get 90% of what you want.

    I’ve been putting a lot of work into my Custom Content Type Manager plugin — it allows you to standardize custom fields and it ties into WordPress’ native post-type functionalities, so it can easily store custom data models, and since it’s doing this via “standard” WordPress you could couple it another search plugin. You can download the current release candidate @ https://wpcctm.com/ — version 0.9.4 is a major release, so I’m asking people to try it out before I release it publicly to the WP repo.

    If it’s a requirement that you use a customized database instead of feeding data into a WordPress pragma, then I’d use a different CMS entirely… Expression Engine (and its underlying CodeIgniter) has good support for custom data models in my opinion, and MODx mounts custom databases very powerfully, but its underlying API (xPDO) needs some updates to its documentation.

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