A client that I do network administration for asked for my help in getting away from her current WordPress host. My suggestion was another WordPress host but she wanted me to try and do it for since she likes my work and trusts me. I advised her that I was familiar with WordPress but not a WordPress developer and she said that was OK, that she would still like to use me for WordPress if I would agree to do it.
So here we are….I am trying to learn PHP to re-code a custom plugin that she has so that she can leave her current host. The plugin in question gets data from the current host to display homes for rent on her website. The host gets that data from Streamline, a vacation rental system that she uses online to manage her properties.
I don’t know why the host downloads data from Streamline and then has the plugin get the same data from them instead of getting the data direct from Streamline other than to lock the client into them. I am trying to recode the plugin to get the data directly from Streamline.
So that’s the situation, but not my immediate issue. My more immediate issue is learning how WordPress shows dynamic pages. By dynamic pages, I mean pages that do not exist before they are requested from the site.
For example, there seems to be a page for each property. You can get the link, save it and use it to see that property anytime by just clicking the link. The links look like this – [https://somerentalsite.com/vrp/unit/487213]) .But, if you go into WordPress and look for those pages (or even the “vrp” directory in the link) they are not there. They don’t exist.
I asked the current host about that today and the only answer I got was “it’s complicated”. Well, that’s not an answer. I really need to know how WordPress generates pages on the fly. Any help you could give me regarding that would be very much appreciated.
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It depends.
What the?? Why on earth does a web host have anything to do with how a plugin works? That sounds bizarre… and not right. I think you’re misunderstanding how something works.
This just comes down to what the data is, and how it needs to be used. There are tons of good data sourcing/importing plugins, one being WP All Import – I use that one for a few property-related clients.
Is the host a freelancer or agency? This sounds like vendor lock-in to me. Unless the host has a bulk plan for a paid API, it just sounds like they’re piping the data through their server.
No that def *is* a valid answer. You just don’t like it. The way WordPress generates pages on the fly and processes data from remote sources can be complicated. 🤷🏻♂️Do you really expect the current host (or maybe you mean developer?) to train you on the ins and outs of WordPress development?
You either need to step up and learn how to do these things on your own (without the current developers help) or you need to explain to the client that you’d be in over your head if you take this on. However you proceed and before you pull the trigger, the client needs to fully understand that handing a complex system off to a new developer is probably costly and time consuming and there are numerous pitfalls that can occur. Sorry to say but that’s basically the situation you’re in.
OP you’re making this way more complicated than it should be. Simply run a full backup be it Cpanel or locally and have a new host migrate it for you, switch dns and job done. Easy.
I don’t know what streamline is, but I’ve ran into several situations where we’ve had to build a 2 part API. The reason is because the originator of the data has had restrictions in the API calls and/or it was process intensive to call directly. Salesforce is an example, where we’ve had to build 2 separate apps : 1 is takes the data from salesforce, processes it, and saves it to the wp database. Their restrictions mandated this, because we were only allowed 100 live queries per day (1) and it was exhaustive (2). A live query + validation took upwards of 5 minutes, in this case it was more than 1,000 entires, with something like 500 fields to validate each. So, it became a cron job twice a day, that got batched. The second part only queries local data, and can be done on request. Again, I don’t know what streamline is but there are valid reasons not to query directly from a 3rd party api.
What language do you speak ? What in the world are you saying ? A Host ? That has real estate data ?
Do you know what an API ? Is ?
I don’t understand what you are saying
See if the data provider has a plugin. Many do these days.