Quite easy.
Setup your site to use a child since you will be using a custom page template. Drtails on setting up your child theme here:
creating a child theme http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
Of course you export your historic data from your Access database and import it into equivalent mySQL tables, make these new tables, WordPress will never know anything about them, only your page templates do, but keeping these tables within the WordPress database makes accessing them easy.
Your query / display page has a custom page template, it has a form like:
<form method="post" action="'.$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"].'">'
with search fields and a search button (probably also page fwd/back/start/end) which all have an input field like:
<input type="submit" name="pg_s" value="<<" />
This page template sorts out if it is being called cold as a fresh page, or is doing a new search, or doing a page fwd/back on the present search. It runs a suitable SQL query on the custom tables and displays the results in the same page.
Give your page a suitable enclosing div(s) with classes atc so that you can customise the CSS.
You will also have table maintenance pages which check for your login credentials and will add / update / delete table entries etc.
WordPress runs nearly all your site, but these customised page templates give you total control of these displays, and WordPress provides your database support services etc, I know of no easier way to make custom database applications.
Thank you for your reply.
Could this work as well? Could I create pages within WordPress and use a table plugin to add the contents directly to the new pages by copying information and pasting in the table? I tried a couple of samples and it works in the search option. If the SQL query is a better option, then I will go with that.
Yes, your pages and table plugin will be quite satisfactory.
The distinction between the two approaches is about the quantity and diversity of possible pages, and the volatility of the data. If there are only a limited number of pages and they don’t change at all, then hand making the pages could well be the simplest solution.
Are you happy to manually create and maintain all the pages, if not then go the SQL route.
