Sorry for the generic title but the questions is kind of involved.
I’ve been doing dev for more than 30yrs now and I’m at the point of hanging my hat. Issue is I run 2 websites for 2 charities, they pay the servers but I wrote all the code and do most of the updates. The Site owners are happy to use a portal to do all their work but it would have to be designed and I just don’t have the energy anymore. Each of the sites was created about 10-15yrs ago using php and MySQL and I had recently begun porting over to sql using azure.
My actual question is, is there a way, using WP to query my sql db and return specific datasets, or mimic using api endpoints without me having to create that intermediate code? They want to be able to remotely administer their content via a portal and I’m hoping some smart folks have developed a way I could just hand over a WP site to them and be done with this eventually.
Hopefully this makes sense.
Thx in advance
Short answer: yes, wp can do that. But it’s to know what you’re describing because it’s very general/vague, but in general terms, yes, there are dozens of different way to manage WP content. The most obvious by doing it in WP itself, but there are also API’s for practically anything you can imagine like the WP REST API. It really depends on how your datasets are built and if there’s a reason they need to reside in non-WP tables.
Yes I am sure you could write code to use your existing database.
But considering ongoing maintenance once you do hang your hat, would that be wise?
If you are going to write code to query your existing database, I believe your skills would be better utilized to export your data and map it to corresponding WP tables. Otherwise any new developer would have a learning curve, which your client would likely have to pay for.
You can try using Gato GraphQL, writing GraphQL queries to connect to the DB. You can go a long way with it before you need to write PHP code
Unless the sites are huge, it would be way easier to just rebuild the sites in WP. Even if the sites are huge, if you separated the content from the code in your custom sites, you can just import everything into a new WP install anyway.
Yes
You can normally make what you want Ro work using custom post types, taxonomies, and the other native WP tables like the options table.
In some cases you might want to extend the db which is also easy.
Registering endpoints and query the database is also extremely easy. And the WP api has all sorts of hooks, functions, and various APIs that make it nonsensical to not use.
Use nocodb and connect to WordPress it will give you a rest api ready to go.