Creating a WordPress website using a Database/Table - wordpress

Question

I am relatively new to WordPress but have a lot of coding experience so I am hoping to pick it up quite quickly.
I am looking to create a website on WordPress that uses a database.
For example, I have made a table of animals consisting of 100 rows, one for each animal, and this is accessible on phpMyAdmin. I want my website to have a page for each row entry in this database.
Ideally, I would like a page to be shown to the user which contains filters. So the user can select maybe "Small" animals which are "Nocturnal". This will then use the database to find all animals which are "Small" and "Nocturnal", and then the page will display the links to the animals which match these filters. Say only "Hamster" matches these filters in my database, then the link to the Hamster page would display on the website.
Then the user can click the Hamster page to find out more about the animal. So I need a page for each animal, but wondered if I could somehow link this to a database I have to help with the filtering options.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Step 1: Create the animals page and display all of them
Set up a page template to show all your animals first, without filters. That should get you started.
To retrieve them, modify the page template file you created above to fetch all the rows in the animals table, like so:
global $wpdb;
$feeds = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM animals", ARRAY_A);
Iterate through the rows to print them out into table form.
Step 2: Create the filters
Create the links on the front end using query parameters, e.g. for a link to all nocturnal animals, use something like:
echo 'Nocturnal';
Step 3: Handle a specific query variable
At the top of your animals template page, use the following code to get a query variable:
$animal_type = get_query_var('animal_type');
So if you accessed the URL http://www.example.com/animals/?animal_type=nocturnal then the value of $animal_type would now be nocturnal.
Now create a new function in functions.php to query for animals using query parameters. Something like this:
$args = array('animal_type' => $animal_type, 'animal_size' => $animal_size);
function get_animals($args);
And iterate through them to print them out.