Wordpress post retriever mod

**yellow1912** · 18 Aug 2007, 04:04 AM

I'm working on a site that has its own blog, so I was thinking what if I can pull the posts about that specific product that the customer viewing and present those to him/her.

So I'm working on it, half way through. It will have these features:
1. Let you set a list of blogs you want to pull articles from. This mod is written for WP, but it should work for most blogs which have a feeder.
2. Let you manually insert articles's links for any specific product.

Let me know if you are interested in any other features.

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Now come to the technical part, read on if you are familiar with PHP coding. I'll describe my approach in this particular mod, let me know if you have any suggestion:
I'm using SimplePie(http://simplepie.org/) for this particular mod, without it the job would me much harder for me.
What I do is: say my site is mysite.com, and I want to search for article about a product with the id 450, I will use SimplePie to parse content from this link:

Code:

http://theblog.com/feed?s=mysite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=450

I will get a list of posts that contain the link to that specific product on my site.
Because a link to a product from a ZC site can vary sometimes (with or without the cPath, seo url,....), you can provide a list of possible "link formats" and the mod will know that it needs to try all those options. You can set defautl "link formats" for all blog or you can set a specific set for any blog you want.
One of the drawbacks right now is that: the feeder usually displays only the 10 latest posts, so it might miss some thing. The good point is: since we will run this on cronjob very often, we usually won't miss any.
And since getting content from another site can get very slow, you may have to run this process every few hours or so, the mod will keep track of all that, all you have to do is to make sure the cronjob works and the posts' links will be retrieved eventually, without slowing down your site.

yellow1912

**busyMom** · 22 Aug 2007, 05:43 AM

This sounds not too dissimilar from something I was wanting to implement on my website. I'll post my plans here, maybe you'll want to integrate some of the ideas, maybe not.

WordPress to be used for three distinct purposes, using categories and sub-categories to help isolate the three different viewing modes:
a) Typical blog usage - category "company blog", for example; sidebox would link to blog to show up in center panel instead of products or news
b) What's New? usage - main page text on ZenCart center panel. Uni-directional posts only - no comments or trackbacks, etc. - category "company news", for example
c) Product review usage - re-directed path from "Review Product" button on product pages (renamed to Discuss Product), used for comments and two-way communication about product, but no trackbacks, etc. - category "company products", for example, sub-category uniquely identify product(s) to be discussed in thread; not sure how I want this to show up in my template yet - I only have a left column and the center column so was thinking I might try to hijack a banner box that would show up as part of the product detail page in the center panel for this if it's possible - just kind of thinking out loud!

I don't want to institute a whole bulletin board community for this purpose when a simple wordpress conversation will suffice for discussing products. I expect that my customer set will be extremely unlikely to leave unsolicited feedback comments, etc. and this is my round-about way to elicit discussion about the products and build a little excitement when appropriate.

Hope this makes sense to you! Thanks - it would be great if your mod work could help reduce some of my workload to personalize my WordPress integration!

Thanks, Karen

**yellow1912** · 22 Aug 2007, 05:47 AM

You might want to have a look at the wordpress mod, which integrates WP and ZC, I think it has some or most of the features you want.

This mod servers a totally different purpose.

**busyMom** · 22 Aug 2007, 05:47 AM

Oh yeah, one more thing I should add, on the (c) plan, I want to modify the "Discuss Product" button to include information about when the last post was. When people see that something was last updated recently, they would be more likely to go out and check out what was written than if they think it hasn't been discussed in four months! So when things get a little slow on a product I want to move, I can post some new discussion specifically about that product (for example, a link to a new gallery sample using the product or discussion item about the usage of the product, etc) and try to draw people in to reading the recent update.

Karen

**yellow1912** · 22 Aug 2007, 05:55 AM

Just to clarify my previous reply:

This mod does not intent to integrate ZC and WP, there is another one that already does the job. You can search the forum for it, I think it's called wordpress mod or something.

Even if you have a WP installed on your server or not, this mod will not touch a single file there. It's designed to work with ANY blog located on ANY host. WP Post Retriever tries to find article relates to a particular product and show them to customers. In the later version it'll also catches "incoming visits" and locate the sources.

Anyway, its name states its purpose: its a blog post retriever, and that's all it does.

**busyMom** · 22 Aug 2007, 05:59 AM

Boy - that was quick! How did you ever sneak in there between my posts?!?!

Yes, I am definetly planning to use the WordPress mod, that's the only way I could even THINK about undertaking what I was planning to do!

The only reason I thought of my ideas when I read your post might have to do with a misunderstanding about what you're doing. It's true, I don't need to be able to look at other blogs since everything is internal, in my case, but it sounded like some of my product review needs are a specific application of what you are doing in a more general way. Never having actually used WordPress yet, I'm not entirely clear on how I'll actually pull this (c) part off, so I thought your mod might be another way. Sorry if I misunderstood!

Karen

**yellow1912** · 22 Aug 2007, 02:36 PM

Well, this mod will retrieve the post along with all the available information such as: published_date, categories, etc.....

I don't know if WP mod can help you blog for certain products and the present it to users (should be easy to do, or modify it to do so). But if it does not support that yet, and you do not want to modify its codes so you can use this one along with that mod.

Regards.