database search, display and management – natural sciences website

I think you’re over thinking the process when you really only need to consider the user interface and maintaining the data. There is no need that I can see for a lookup/translation table between species and related content using URLs and IDs.

You are right that a custom post type would be useful, unless the site has no need now or in the future for normal blog posts. In that case, blog posts could stand in for custom posts. You still have pages to present non-taxonomic content.

Why not have the post title be the specie and content contains the related information? If the information needs to be more structured, custom fields can be used for structured data. Then when someone searches for a particular specie, the related post is returned directly, no need to fool around with IDs and URLs. An URL with the specie name is more user friendly than one with an ID.

Then one can add or edit posts as is normally done, no need for coding custom forms and user interface. Except maybe for some custom fields, for which plugins are readily available.

Initially importing the data will take some custom coding to translate the spreadsheet data into WP data. I believe there are plugins that will import Excel data, but I’m unsure it’ll be in a useful format. A custom script to process a CSV export would be fairly simple to write. You’ll likely need to export in large chunks to keep the file sizes manageable. You can hire help for this part from jobs.wordpress.net.

Hello bcworkz,

thank you very much for your advices. You certainly are true, I am maybe bulding a too complex process ; and I will see where it is possible to cut to do it more simple.

But certain facts are compulsory in this project :
– I need to have URL with species “ID_Valide” as it reflect the current valid taxonomy ; and it is the way other taxonomic website are built (it allow people to gather easily information for database management purpose, etc.).
– I need to have also blog post (news) in another part of the website, and also dedicated pages, so custom post type are mandatory.
– As you precise it, I will certainly have to split databases in several chunks to deal with manageable content ; and I will have to manage very different contents like figures, leaflet maps, text (from words to big paragraphs, etc.). So I think that dedicated tables labelled in row by “ID_Valide” will be a good solution.

Up to now, I have found a couple of plugin that seems to be useful with the content I have to display :
– Toolset types
– Custom DB tables

The main question that remain is how will be created the URL (one for each species) that will display custom post type content linked to databases…
In fact I would like the pages to be generated (URL & content) after the users have selected a species in a search form… exemple :

1) in the search box I type : Lecano…
2) the search box with autocomplete propose :
Lecanora muralis
Lecanora strobilina
Lecanora sambuci
Lecanora chlarotera
…
3) I click on Lecanora muralis
4) as this species is now synonym of Protoparmeliopsis muralis, I am redirected to the page (the custom post type with the template and links to databases I have built) of this species.
[Here is the main question : how will be generated the page ? Have it to be pre-existant or can it be generated by building the URL according to the query (the URL can be store in the taxonomic correspondance table (see illustration in first post) and then displaying the content that is linked to the URL (i.e. the “ID_Valid” ?).

Exemple : if the URL is : https://www.mywebsite/sp/234034 –> the page display all informations linked to 234043 (“ID_Valid) in the custom content type. (and in fact this page does not pre-exist, just the template exist and the content is displayed after the URL). Is it possible ?

Thank your for your help !

RPO

Thanks for the additional explanations. So definitely a custom post type, that’s not a problem. It’s possible to have numeric post slugs and yet have normal text as a title. When importing data there’s no problem with this, but manually adding a post with a numeric slug introduces an odd quirk where WP appends “-2” to any number entered as a slug, even though there is no other slug with the same number.

If the ID slug could have an alphabetic component, WP will not try to add “-2”. For example, “ID-12345” as a slug is not a problem. But entering “12345” is a problem because WP will insist that it be “12345-2”. It may be possible to override this behavior, but things will be much easier if slugs can be alphanumeric, as in “ID-12345”.

In a similar vein, a custom post type slug can be different than its labels. The post type can be labeled “Species”, but its slug can be “sp”, so the URL could be something like example.com/sp/ID-12345/. I’m assuming the page content would be created by the import script, so following the above URL takes one directly to the “Species” post with the ID_Valid 12345. Besides title, ID slug, and content, the rest can be handled with custom fields.

One field can be for redirects for synonymous species. If this field exists for the post for Lecanora muralis, the user can be redirected to Protoparmeliopsis muralis. Similar to how disambiguation links work in Wikipedia. So far, I don’t see a need for custom tables, this can all be handled using the standard WP data schema. The main reason to use custom tables is to accommodate custom queries that would not be easily attainable using the default schema. Ever since WP introduced complex meta queries for WP_Query, the need for custom tables is rarely justified.