WordPress Interaction with MySQL for a Job Board Site

[lordram]

I am currently developing a Job Board website (intern.goodlifeeducation.com) using a theme called WP Jobus. I find the theme to be pretty good but since the nature of the website is quite complex, and there are a lot of users that shall be coming on the website, it is important that the website be scalable and error free. For this reason, I find it important to understand every aspect of the theme and in detail: how my website is working.

My questions are regarding the interaction a website like this would have with a MySQL database. I have read up a little on how WordPress interacts with MySQL in general and the extent of my knowledge is till the 11 default WordPress tables.

1. Where and how does WordPress store information that my users will enter?
For example, a Job Seeker will upload his resume, provide contact information and lots of other information about himself or herself. Where and how does this information get stored ?

2. How can I extract this information to be displayed or used otherwise?

3. I have no idea how the search option uses user preferences to return the desired jobs but I think that it is closely linked to the database. Any light on this aspect will be really helpful as well.

I need to mention that I am not very strong with WordPress as of yet but I do understand few of the major concepts and I am open to reading and studying anything and everything. Any resources, any links will be very helpful.

Thanks a lot for your time ??
Ram

[suparna chowdhury]

hello @lordram,
1. all data is saved in the database, if you have access tot the database you can got here and see that how data is saved in different tables. you might take look at the following link

https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-to-wordpress-database-management-with-phpmyadmin/

Remember one thing always, do not edit or mess up the database if you don’t know what you are doing.
2.Moving over, please excuse as I myself am not a tech shabby person, you can extract information posted on your site using various wordpress functions, hooks etc. If you want to display information to user which they posted you might use a loop.

https://blog.teamtreehouse.com/wordpress-loop-beginners-guide”

https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/the-wordpress-loop-explained-for-beginners

3. Well this point will need more elaboration. Everything is linked to database, but you don;t need to go that path. WordPress has hooks, functions and lots of(I mean really lots of, just google it) tutorials for any task you want to do. If the jobs are listed, they might have tags associated with them, which help the search to return them when user enter search keyword related to them. this link is an old dated but gives an insight to newbie about wordpress search

https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/02/11/understanding-and-fixing-wordpress-search/

I hope someone technical might come here and explain in detail. Let us know if you require any further help.

[lordram]

Thank you for your reply. Appreciate it. But I am still not clear about this. Allow me to ask this in a different way. Consider the following block of HTML which is an input field asking the name of a Job Seeker:

<input type="text" name="fullName" id="fullName" value="" class="input-textarea" placeholder=""/>

When a user enters his name here and clicks on the submit button, what exactly happens and where does this data get stored. If you could refer to particular WordPress Functions that do this, it would be really great.

Thanks again ??

[suparna chowdhury]

Well, to be simply put when the user enters submit, word press collects the data user entered and store in the database table for this form. It gets store for the form object in a manner depending on which method the form is using, get/post method. I am not a technical person so lets just hope someone technical bumps in here and explain it in professional way. Till then I found you some links which might help you to grasp a bit.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/wpdb_Class#INSERT_rows

https://zachis.it/blog/make-form-and-save-it-into-mysql-database/

https://www.scriptscoop.net/t/fbc54d65ea99/get-value-form-wordpress-database.html

this link is not about WordPress, but it explains how a CMS works. If you would open a finder and search with form keyword you will go the form section where it explains how a php form is created and used. So you might learn something form there as WordPress uses php.
https://css-tricks.com/php-for-beginners-building-your-first-simple-cms/

hope these helps. Have a good day.