use case?

  • Deon

    (@deon-b)


    8 months ago

    Hello!

    I have an idea and I would like to know if your plugin can do what I am after. I own a website where we wrote about 400 product reviews manually over the past years.

    I am thinking to encapsule each review in a database, so that we can re-use it for different articles.

    For example, let’s say we have a Participant Database review. The review is 2000 words and it includes images and ratings and pros/cons, formatting and etc.

    If this review was in a database, we could automatically insert it when we write an article like:

    Top 10 Database Plugins

    but also in

    Top 10 WordPress Plugins

    and also in

    Top 10 WordPress Database Plugins

    so we could recycle the same text by calling the data from the database.

    Would this be doable with your plugin?

    What worries me about .csv is losing formatting (bold text, bullet points, etc) or images and position of images inside the text, etc.

    Can we do this with your plugin?

    If not, could you suggest me an alternative?

    Thank you!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author xnau webdesign

    (@xnau)

    If you are planning to insert reviews into your site content, it would probably be more convenient to keep those reviews as custom posts rather than database entries. I don’t have any specific examples, but there are likely several plugins that are for the purpose of managing reviews that use custom posts.

    That said, yes, the plugin can do this, but it’s not really optimized for this specific thing. One of the main advantages of using the database instead of custom posts is that it is easy to structure the content into components that you define. This is good if, for instance, your reviews are structured as the result of a questionnaire.

    You’re right to be concerned about the CSV import, it isn’t well suited to HTML content and you can run into trouble with things like quotes confusing the format…it’s not very robust for complex textual data. Custom posts will use an XML import, which is more difficult to convert your external data to, but is a much more reliable way to import data.

    Thread Starter Deon

    (@deon-b)

    Thanks for your reply!

    Since this seems like a lot of work and maybe something wordpress is not even designed for, would it work if I create an external database using a different CMS and then simply embed it in my wordpress site?

    If yes, do you have any solution idea advice? My coding skills are very rudimentary.

    Plugin Author xnau webdesign

    (@xnau)

    If you don’t have some pretty good coding skills, my advice is stick with WordPress, and take some time to find a plugin that will get you as close as possible to the functionality you need. Sometimes it is best to go with a premium plugin in order to get the feature set you want.

    Managing reviews is definitely something WordPress can do well, but it will take some effort to set up, that can’t be avoided.

    Thread Starter Deon

    (@deon-b)

    Thank you, I will look into this.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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