Plugin for Connecting to Platform/website

  • Does anyone have tips on developing a plugin to keeping a persistent connection to a website/platform to avail of features and services of said website/platform or point us to the right direction? Our team would like to develop a plugin that could utilize a platform’s features from its (plugin) interface.

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Developing with WordPress topic
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  • There’s several ways, but it will dpeend on what’s needed by the system. Is the data communicatoin one-way, two-ways, synchronus, asnychronus? What format is the data feed? How does the remote system expect connections to be made? What is the data used for?

    That’s just the questions that I can think of in 10 seconds, so there’s probably 100’s more things to consider before anyone could give you much of a real idea of what you need or what can be done.

    As something very vague, there’s the REST API for updating the site itself, and you can set up any sort of external connector that you want to draw data from external sites. How and where that data is used… that’s the hard part. ??

    Thread Starter midnitedev

    (@midnitedev)

    Hi @catacaustic, data communication will be 2-way, plugin users will be able to see messages from our platform and we should see theirs on ours when they send them. I’m thinking that an api key would serve the purpose here as the connector should the api be ready for production. One of the purposes that data would most likely be for is real-time messaging, but also for scheduling, message history, etc.

    Everything will depend on the API That the remote system uses and how it integrates. There’s no point suggesting to use XML-RPC when the system that you’re trying to connect to runs a JSON API interface.

    One thing to keep in mind is that PHP isn’t a continuous language for processing. It runs the script, does what it needs to do and stops. It’s not persistant, and wasn’t designed to be persistant. That normally means that connections are opened and closed a lot, not kept open. Most times you’ll have to connect to the external API from WordPress when it’s needed, and then to connect to WordPress from the external API When it’s needed.

    Really, without knowing exactly what you need to do it’s hard ot suggest anything more. LIke I said at the start there’s 100s of way to do connections and API calls, but they are all pretty specific, and will need you to do a lot of work to integrate them no matter what interface your remote API system has.

    Thread Starter midnitedev

    (@midnitedev)

    Thanks for showing the way. Appreciate it.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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