Organising Custom Content for Wordpress - wordpress

I am already very confused as I am typing this thread out. Please forgive me if my query is a little too difficult to understand.
I have an existing Real Estate Site that I intend to move 100% into WordPress. The existing site has one backend for listings and another blog section for reviews.
You can probably see why I have decided to make the move to a full WordPress powered site. Maintaining both ends of the site is both tedious & cumbersome.
I have read and understood Custom Post Types & Custom Taxonomies and how they work. I am rather excited about implementing them. However there is some content I am finding difficult to organise.
* An existing database table of about 4,000 Condominium Projects
Each entry in the Condominiums table has some "bio-data" like Year Completed, No. of Units, Facilities, Amenities etc.
Currently each listing in my site has an ajax query that fetches information from this table on demand.
In the new site, I intend to have a link to the respective condominium in each property listing.
This link should display information about the specific condo and display 'results' of matching listings.
Also, some condos have long article reviews done for them. In my current site, these reviews are displayed in the blog section. Separated altogether.
So here's my question.
How would I connect everything together. A duplicate perhaps? Taxonomy & Post for each condo? That will mean over 3,000 unique entries. Wouldn't that be an "overkill"?
If it is a taxonomy, the link will probably display all posts (listings) that have that condo name. But it wouldn't link to an actual page of either it's review or bio-data.
Any thoughts will be very much appreciated... Please feel free to ask if I have missed out any vital information!
Thanks in advance

The seems very straightforward to me and a perfect fit for WordPress (and I shudder to think of doing anything in Drupal you don't have too; and this from someone who developed in Drupal for 2+ years...)
Anyway:
Each condo gets stored in a custom post type.
All the "bio-data" gets stored in a custom field. Alternately you could create a taxonomy called "bio-data" and have a term value for each of the options but this won't work well for things like "SqFt" unless you do ranges (i.e. 1200sft-1300sqft) because terms can only be used for "true/false" attributes (i.e. either it applies or it doesn't) and not for specifics like exact offer prices, etc.
The long articles can just be stored in the "content" section of the condo post type (unless you have multiple per condo then you can either store in comments as #Jan Fabry suggested or you can create a custom post type "review")
Like I said this is really straightforward. Of course I've lived and breathed database apps for 20+ years so it comes second nature to me. Any questions, just ask...

This was how I managed to solve my own question!, Ironically enough, MikeSchinkel had an almost identical answer, so I accepted his answer instead.. So here's what I have:
A Custom Post Type for Condominiums labelled 'Reviews' in the admin section. The property 'Bio-data' is in custom fields. This Custom Post Type has a rewrite rule:
array( 'slug' => 'condominium' );
That way, I managed to have each Permalink to show something like:
http://domain.com/condominium/post-title
I have added a page called Condominiums and had it set to use a custom template - which basically shows the latest posts of condominiums with reviews. I also intend to extend the template for it to show a Search Condominiums function.
Added relevant taxonomies that can be searchable - like Brands & Developers.
I have already converted previous reviews to this. The last thing I will have to do will be to post all the Condominiums from the condominiums database to the wp_posts table using this Custom Post Type.
This is the part I am crossing my fingers for as I will have to see if the rewrite rules are going to significantly slow down my site as this will be 4,000 entries. This issue has been recently brought to my attention here
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12935
I will update this thread once I have completed the importing - since this is the only place I have posted a question and have it answered - if anyone might be interested!
Thank you for your suggestions. I hope this helps someone else who is in a similar predicament.

Would it work if you view the Condominiums as posts, and the reviews as comments to these posts? This would keep them together, and is conceptually not even too far from the original intention. You can put the extra information in custom fields and tags (which gives you free searching capabilities). Then you should see for yourself if you still need to create a custom post type, or just do it with regular posts (why not?).
But yes, you are stretching the original WordPress concept a little. Drupal or some other CMS might be a better option, and have more plugins that are suited to your situation.

Related

API to get posts from a Drupal blog?

I'm giving a shot to rebuilding the newsletter-maker for my wife's company. The prime issue is setting it up to always/automatically, say, link to the 3 most recent posts on their blog.
I can imagine how to start doing with with Rails and Javascript (my areas of "expertise" as a relatively amateur coder), except for the part where I have absolutely no idea where I would get this stream of posts.
The site (and thus the blog) is on Drupal. I know so zero about Drupal that I'm not 100% sure what "on Drupal" actually means. But I googled Drupal API and it's too vast for me to know where to start, and searching "blog" on the API site doesn't return anything helpful.
PS. I do know how to work with APIs. Once I find one!
PPS. Is this just a matter of working with RSS feeds? (Which I also don't know how to do but I imagine it's easy to find an answer)
You can implement an RSS feed with the Views module.
In short, you would have to take the following steps:
create a view of the blog posts. Use filter criteria to select only published posts, and sort criteria to sort blogposts from most recent to older.
add a display 'Feed'
Under 'Feed settings' specify a path.
That's it. For more detailed tutorial, see e.g this link (disclaimer: I'm not the author of the referred blogpost).
Finally, extract the latest three RSS items with your newsletter-maker.

how to create search filter in wordpress

I have a website, a real estate website and I need to have a search filter, so my client can easily identify what they want or what expected budget they can! I have see this website showing same way to implement click here.
can somebody guide me what should do to make this.
If you can suggest a tutorial I appreciate it.
To pull it off you need some good understanding of The Loop and how to create personalized queries with WP_query
In a nutshell, the page you provided has its real estate logic in a custom post type named "Listings" and some tags such as "bedroom" and "price".
I am not allowed to post more than 1 hyperlink, so please use google and search the words in bold style.
A page template performs a query with the desired filters, such as "3 Bedrooms" and "200000 $", and displays the results in several rows.
A custom post type and tags, since the listing will not automagically appear in your site's backend....
If you ask me, wordpress isn't suited for this kind of features.
I say this beacause you will often need custom plugins such as advanced custom fields, to accomplish trivial tasks like this one...
It will ultimately be a stressful situation for you.
I hope it helps.

Manage custom content blocks on a page

I'm putting together my own Wordpress theme for a very specific set of client requirements. I'm fine with front-end theme work, but I need some help with back end.
The task is kind of like a support site, with lots of Q and A's. I'm building a support site for a company, which means most Pages will be populated with many questions and associated answers.
The page Structure would be something like this:
Home Page (with links to Most recent Q+As added) and common sections
-How to use the app (10-20 Q+As on page)
-How to manage integrations (10-20 Q+As on page)
-Other page (10-20 Q+As on page)
-5-10x 'Other pages'
About Us
Contact Support
Requirements and my comments
-Each Q and A does not have it's own URL
This makes using Posts for Q and A's unattractive.
-Each Page is made up of a Table of Contents which allows quick scrolling to questions
An ideal solution would be some code on the page theme template which grabs each "Q and A" object within a certain category/section/identifier and load it to the page
-New questions and answers can quickly and easily be added
The ideal solution for support reps is that they can add a question and answer, and assign a category, rather than edit a huge page of questions.
-Order of Q and A's on page is important
Ideal solution should allow you to order the Q+As within their given category/section/other.
-On the home page, most recent Q+As added list exists
-Each Page of Q+As has a "last updated" date, which is the date the most recent Q+A was most recently modified.
Ideas I had
Posts or custom posts seemed like a good idea, but they create permalinks. But my "Pages" would actually be Category Archive pages. We don't want a Q+A to be be assigned two categories. Also, custom post ordering seems difficult. If we could suppress permalinks and ensure on category or section and find a way to order them - this could work.
FAQ Plugins
It seems like these all are a bit clunky and the amount of custom dev to re-skin on it might not be worth it, might be easier to do something totally custom.
Question:
does anyone have any ideas how this could be achieved?
The best thing is to use custom post types. Basically two custom post types, question and answer. Then each question can have categories tags and so on. Answers can have a custom field with question ID so you can easily get all the answers by question ID. If you need then not to have unique url, than create two files: single-question.php and single-answer.php and put 404 page code there so if user will get to the url of a single question or answer than he will see 404 error :)

dynamic WordPress custom meta boxes

I'll try and give an example what i want:
(this isn't what I'm doing, but it seems like a decent example of how I'd like it to work)
Imagine we have a custom post type (CPT) of 'houses' and one of the custom meta options for this CPT is 'bedrooms' - obviously, different houses have different amount of bedrooms, all of which have different properties. So, I'd like to be able to allow the user to add several different properties about a bedroom i.e.
Dimensions, aspect, number of windows and floor type
When the user has added these details for the first bedroom, if the house has a second bedroom then I would like them to have an 'add bedroom' button and another set of these meta boxes is added so they can fill out the details about bedroom 2.
I understand that I'll need some javascript to add this facility (and something I don't mind writing) but what I'm struggling with in my poor, useless brain is how to save these to the database. I want to achieve this using WordPress meta so that I don't add any unnecessary database tables and I'm sure it's possible I just can't quite fathom the principles of how to save the data.
Pointers to any tutorials would be brilliant, or some examples of plugins which already do this kind of thing would be very gratefully received.
here is a screenshot to get an idea what i want to do.
Solution:
I have found solution here, it might be helpful for someone.
https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/25478/custom-post-type-metabox-array
You are basically after repeater metaboxes. A few metabox classes support repeating fields. One worth checking out is http://www.farinspace.com/wpalchemy-metabox/
I wrote a plugin that uses repeating metabox fields that doesn't use wp-alchemy if you want to dig through it. http://code.google.com/p/css-thumbnail-sprites/

Drupal, Ubercart products relating to blog articles and vice-versa

I'm very new to drupal however what I'm trying to achieve I assumed would be relatively straightforward but finding any documentation on the subject is proving difficult.
I am creating an ecommerce site using ubercart, i have installed this and all of the relevant modules and have created custom product pages with not much hassle. What I need to do is create a 'blog' that's articles can relate to one or multiple products. I have managed to set up the blog with no issues but I am struggling to find out how I can first of all link the story to a product in the product creation process (i.e. when creating a product I can choose a blog article from a list to form a relationship). I have kind of managed to provide this required relationship using the References module. But I have no idea how I can use this relationship to, for instance dynamicall display a list of products related to the current blog article or vice-versa.
I have previously asked a similar question but an still unable to figure this out.
Many thanks.
If the field is attached to the blog content type then you'll have a list of related products automatically outputted in the field display. If you haven't, go to the 'Manage Display' section for that content type and make sure that field isn't hidden.
The References module is only uni-directional currently so you'd have to code a solution for the other way around yourself (not particularly tricky). Alternatively you could ditch References altogether and try the Relation Module which defines bi-directional relationships between entities.

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