Pods vs. NinjaTables and should I create ACTs?

  • Resolved goodmanjim

    (@goodmanjim)


    4 years, 5 months ago

    I am building a price comparison site for myself, think a simple version of wine-searcher.com but for a different product category. Will need custom interaction to the Db since will want to dump/import data for pricing, etc. that isn’t mainstream (no Ebay, Amazon, etc.).

    Have many tables that relate to each other, doing master/detail stuff, and are not part of the WP “system”. But I would like to be able to utilize the WP features such as comments, reviews/ratings, etc. at some point…

    Question: Should I create ACTs for my existing non-standard tables so that I have “forms”, etc. and if so can I then utilize comments, etc. Or should I use something like WPNinjaTables or WPdatatables to pull the data form the Db and format tables, but then don’t have individual “items” that I can attache comments to (I don’t think).

    And architecture advice would be greatly appreciated. New to WP and obviously Pods, but would like to utilize the features of WP and it’s plugin community while doing my own “thing” :-).

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  • Plugin Author Jory Hogeveen

    (@keraweb)

    Hello @goodmanjim

    Honestly, this is an quite specific edge case. For WordPress core features I’d say you could create a custom post type with such features enabled and then create database link between these custom posts and your database structure.

    Cheers, Jory

    Thread Starter goodmanjim

    (@goodmanjim)

    Thanks for the input. (being verbose for archival purposes should someone come upon this question someday)

    For most of my data/architecture, I’ve gone with custom post type so that I can utilize WP features and other plugins (such as adding a rating/review feature later), which can be displayed. This also allows for each Brand and Product to have it’s own page created in WP in order to utilize said features and functionality, that is why we use WP isn’t it :-), and I don’t want to have to re-invent the wheel ding it homegrown (my old world, which is why I ask these questions).

    As for the Pods plugin or using something else… I have played pretty extensively with both at this point. While the commercial plugins may be a bit more polished, they have limited functionality, often designed for you to buy add-ons to get that function. Sure Pods has a steeper learning curve which I’m fighting, but it is far more flexible. I am creating a master/list/detail price comparison site with it now (or trying to figure it out ?? )

    Data that needs to be updated and acted upon (i.e. scraped pricing data that needs to be matched up to products) will be done in an Advanced Content Type (ACT) using it’s own database table. And while matching to a CPT isn’t optimal, that data can be exported to a separate table specifically for that purpose since products don’t change that often and the gain/benefit of the WP features on an actual system post (i.e. can use comments, reviews, etc. as mentioned above) outweigh the negatives.

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