[Web4lib] webforms, database interaction, and wordpress

[Hogue Melanie]

The following may only help with the display part of your project. I came up with the following strategy to pull MS SQL data manipulated with ASP.net and C#. I'm assuming we are talking about something similar to a library catalog. I haven't tried to write to the DB this way; so this will only be a small part of what you need to consider.
 
I only write Javascript, CSS and HTML; so I used an iframe tag and a link like the following to import a set of results in an HTML, Javascript, and CSS template. iframe is probably not the most robust code there is; but it could be cool for a blog.
 
http://www.lib.chattanooga.gov/catalog.html?contentLoc=http://lib.chattanooga.gov/polaris/search/default.aspx
 
Look at the source code of this. /polaris/ utilizes the ASP.net; all the rest of the site is just static HTML, Javascript and CSS. You should be able to do something similar in a Wordpress blog if you can design it on a code level. PHP accessing MySQL would be different code than ASP.net and SQL; but the interface (Wordpress) should still be able to import DB data using plain ol' Javascript to assign the values from a form into a URL containing a search string that will pull the data from MySQL. In this case, I am just using the catalog interface as it is instead of designing a different one. Or maybe it could be just the raw MySQL display if it doesn't have to be pretty. Hopefully your Wordpress site will be pliable enough to display one or the other.
 
Melanie Amy Hogue
Manager of Online Resources & Reports
Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library
423-757-5114

________________________________

From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org on behalf of c
Sent: Fri 5/27/2011 1:17 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] webforms, database interaction, and wordpress



I am looking for resources and information on creating custom forms that
write to and query external mysql databases and getting those forms
integrated into wordpress sites. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I feel like I should not have to write database connections etc from
scratch, but I do not know what frameworks tend to play well with wordpress.
I have done some initial searches and it seems like once I build the
funcitonality I need I will probably need to bring the php files into
wordpress as a plugin.


Thanks,
Purcell
_______________________________________________
Web4lib mailing list
Web4lib at webjunction.org
http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/