Support External Database

Hi MG–

Are you asking us to develop this or are you wondering if you can do it?

As one of the new maintainers of the plugin, it is something we could consider but I don’t think it would be a high priority. I suspect it would take a lot of work to do as the plugin relies on the WordPress hooks pretty heavily.

On the other hand, if you’re an experienced developer and this is something you’d like to take on, TSML is an open source project and you should feel free to fork the project and create a branch.

Am I answering your questions?

Are you asking us to develop this or are you wondering if you can do it?
— Yes.

On the other hand, if you’re an experienced developer and this is something you’d like to take on, TSML is an open source project and you should feel free to fork the project and create a branch.
— I’m not a wordpress developer,I do more backend server development.I’m curios to know why you decided to write meetings data into the WP_POST table which is a wordpress table and not in a separate mysql table more specific for meetings data.
I’m asking this because we need to integrate our existing very old internal application at the Central Office to the 12 Step meeting guide plugin. We would like to use only one database and (I repeat myself) it would be preferable to write meeting data in one database table rather than manually exporting and importing data.

Thank you
MG

Hi MG–

I am one of a team that recently took over the 12-Step-Meeting-List. I was not involved in the original development of the plugin, and cannot answer your question about why it was done this way other than to speculate it was easier to integrate using WordPress functions.

In any case, I suggest forking the project if you want to create a version that meets your backend requirements.

You may want to wait a few days as we’re getting ready change the name of the GitHub account. Once we do that, I’ll be updating the site here reflecting the new repo.

it seems you want to be able to manually execute SQL statements to update / sync the meetings database table, independent of the backend WordPress GUI for the 12 Step Meeting Plugin database?

If you know SQL, it would simplify the chore.

I know you are right, SQL is one of the possibilities we are considering, we are also looking at the possibility to use WordPress REST API JSON. If we can communicate directly to WordPress->12 Step Meeting Guide and vice versa via WP REST API we can interchange meeting data in JSON format between our application and the WP->12 StepMeetingGuide.Do you think this will work?

MG

I think it already works this way. I’ve adapted a Meeting Name Search with autocomplete on Harbor Area using just javascript and autocomplete libraries to parse and populate the 12 Step Meetings already–Yes, go for it!

Thank you, one last “side question” that it might be related.
In the 12-Step-Meeting-Guide plugin settings->Data Sources it is saying:

————————–
Data sources are JSON feeds that contain a website’s public meeting data. They can be used to aggregate meetings from different sites into a single master list. The data source for this website is right here. More information is available at the Meeting Guide API Specification.
————————–
when I click the link “right here” I get the following error:
{“error”:”HTTP\/1.1 401 Unauthorized”}

the url in question is https://<mywebsite>/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=meetings

thanks
MG

Oh, yes,

in 12 Step Meeting List settings>
Sharing
You can share your meeting information with other websites and apps via your meetings feed.
>[open/restricted]

setting it to open:
https://<mywebsite>/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=meetings returns a document of the meetings encoded in JavaScript Object Notation

setting it to restricted requires a key to view json meetings, or a 404 results.

I actually queried all central offices websites for this json url, and found a commonality that most meetings are in the evening/night, nationwide, after using Big Data analysis tools in Python…

Though some Central offices do keep this restricted, others keep it to Sharing setting.

IMHO, sharing is key to recovery?

In fact I combined my knowledge of SQL & WordPress PHP functionality, to create a shortcode that triple queries the Meeting Custom Post Types, and results in a directory, that can be printed to PDF if desired.

The triple query sorts by day, city and time, separating each into categories.

https://hacoaa.org/aa-meetings/ is a meeting directory without website headers of footers and can be paginated with a PDF Reader, for paper printing, also.