Piotr

It can’t be that easy. 😉 Does it require subdomain install or would you try it on subdirectories? How should I set the path of a site? Now it’s ‘/wp/site1/’, so it should be… No, I’m lost.

Well, this is surprising, I did something completely different from what you suggested and it works. 😉 This was my inspiration. I made a form similar to the one in the tutorial. It creates an array which I’m saving in the options table using AJAX. JQuery lets me add new fields and a simple PHP loop inserts values of previously saved options, so I can edit or even delete them from the form. It’s exactly what I wanted. It appears that I have some problems with my JQuery – appended fields aren’t being validated for some reason – I’m sure it’s some newbie mistake that I made. I’ll find it sooner or later.

But I need one more advice on my articles section. As I stated before, I’m appending forum posts as article chapters. I could append them with ‘<!––nextpage––>’ so every chapter would be a separate page. This would be nice, but – no surprise here, I hope – I want something more. An index of those chapters, with titles., preferably on the sidebar. I have some ideas, but I need to know if I’m on the right track.

First thing, the pagination – on many sites it takes form of links ‘previous’ and ‘next’, but there are ways to make it look like ‘Page: [1] [2] [3] [4]’. If there are page numbers, there could be page titles, I just need a way to put them there. I’m thinking of two solutions. 1. putting the titles in my options table, maybe even using the form that I created or 2. putting the titles in a tag on my forum which after importing WordPress would see as a shortcode. In both cases I’m not sure how to use them later as links in the chapter list.

And the second thing is actually putting the list on the sidebar. Would it require creating a widget? And how to connect it to the post that is currently displayed?

I realize that those two problems may be easy to solve but until now I’ve been focusing on the backend functionality. I just need to know where to start and what to look for. So once again – I’m asking for a little help. 😉

Ups, I forgot to mark the topic as resolved, I’m sorry. But I’ll share my progress while I’m here.

So… I did it. By using a form and some jQuery/AJAX I’m able to import and/or update specific news wih one click. It’s great. 😉 And I’m amazed, how many possibilities I now have with the jQuery alone. Even the form validation is great this way. So thank you again for all the help.

But as I’m planning something bigger now, another section of my site, you’ll probably hear from me again in a couple of days. It’s going to be articles section with each article formed from a set of forum posts. I still need to wrap my head around it, but it looks like I’ll need to dynamically create a form and a set of options for each article that needs to be added. This is going to be complicated…

Hmm, I did some reading – what if the server timeout value is lower than I need? I mean the set_time_limit() will work if execution time limit in php,ini is the only problem.

About the array – that’s exactly what I mean. More than that, when I try to pass an array ( key => value ), only the value is passed. I didn’t know what the problem was until I used print_r on the variable in my function. I know that I’m a newbie, but I think this isn’t normal. 😉

I was thinking about using two functions, but as you probably remember, importing posts in my case was quite complicated – inserting posts, terms, term taxonomies, modifying the data etc., is a lot of code. Using two such functions for almost the same thing didn’t seem very efficient. So I chose to pass an argument. I’m handling it this way:

if ( $arg[0] = 'limit' )
            $limit = "LIMIT " . $options['limit'];
        else
            $limit = " LIMIT 2";

(I’m using the ‘else’ for testing, I didn’t want to import all 900 posts just to see if this works. 😉 )

And it does work, yay! 😉 But there’s a problem. I’m trying to set a second event and for some reason I can’t do it. Here’s how I do it:

if ( ! wp_next_scheduled( 'hourly_import', array( 'limit' ) ) ) {

            wp_schedule_event( time(), 'two_min', 'hourly_import', array( 'limit' ) );
        }
        add_action( 'hourly_import', array( 'News', 'news_import' ) );

if ( ! wp_next_scheduled( 'daily_import' ) ) {

            wp_schedule_event( time(), 'five_min', 'daily_import' );
        }
        add_action( 'daily_import', array( 'News', 'news_import' ) );

This in my class constructor. Obviously I’m using custom intervals to test these events, but only the first one is working. The daily_import event isn’t even added – I checked _get_cron_array, only the hourly_import event is set. What am I missing? Is there something I don’t know about adding multiple events or am I doing some, well… stupid mistake? There are no errors when I use the code.

As for AJAX, yes, you are right. There would be no sense in postponing it at this point. I just need to find out how to get the schedules up and running – I’ll need two or three more of these later on, as I’m planning to import some more data. And then I’ll move on to AJAX. Thanks for the links.

I’m back after some time. I hope you had great holidays.

I need to thank you for all your advice, bcworkz. After a while I’ve got to a point where I’m building an actual plugin and it works as intended. Now I’m trying to make it use the settings API to dynamically change the sql query and it’s getting a little too complicated for my level of PHP and WordPress knowledge, so it’s time to ask more questions. 😉 But I think it will be better if I start a new topic. Thanks again!

Thank you bcworkz!

You gave me an idea. A few even. I’ll start from the end. 😉

Scheduling the import won’t help me. I checked my server limits, it has daily queries limits. But the limit is in millions, and by doing simple math (if 10 posts require 200 queries, 1 post = 20 queries) I can see that inserting my 900 posts this way would give me about 18 000 queries. I know that’s A LOT, but even if I wouldn’t care and updated all my posts every hour, I still would be quite safe. I do care though, and the least efficient way I’m considering right now is doing the big update once a day and updating 10 latest posts every hour. That would give me ~23 000 queries. Still a lot, but could be worse. And I prefer to be efficient, so…

The direct approach. At the very beginning, when I did research on doing this import, I found out how to do this in MySQL – you can use good old INSERT INTO SELECT on both wp_posts and wp_term_relationships (I did it just five minutes ago to be sure if I remember correctly and it works). It’s a little complicated, but here’s how to do it.

First you insert data into wp_posts – you have to remember you’re not using wp_insert_post anymore, so you need to take care of most of the columns by yourself (post_title, post_content, post_name, post_date, post_date_gmt, post_type, post_status). In my case I needed to use FROM_UNIXTIME for both dates and LCASE and REPLACE space with “-” for topic_name.

Then the wp_term_relationships table – there are only three columns here (object_id, term_taxonomy_id, term_order). You insert your post ID in the first one, and in the term_taxonomy_id you insert the ID of your category or tag (which you’ll find in wp_terms table). The third column is set to 0 in my case, but it will probably change if I create categories inside categories, I’m not sure.

And that’s it. My WordPress doesn’t complain after this, I can see the post in the loop, in category view and single post view, so I think it’s OK. But you may be right about using the wp_set_object_terms. If I would need to set a category and a few tags, this could be better. I see a problem though.

wp_set_object_terms needs the post ID. If I’m not using wp_insert_post, I’m not getting the ID. Would it be OK to insert posts with my ID? Posts on my forum have a topic ID. It would be great if I could use it as post ID, later on I could even import topic replies as comments thanks to it. But will WordPress accept that? The ID is auto incremented, won’t there be any errors if I insert posts with IDs like 120 or 350?

Oh, and one more question – warning, it’s kind of noobish. ;p As I said, before I did this in MySQL (INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_posts (all the columns) SELECT all the values FROM forumdb.topics and a few joins), how do I use wpdb here? $wpdb for inserting columns, new wpdb ($mydb in my example) for getting post data from the forum but how should the whole query look like?

Thanks for your patience.

Thank you for your help. I still have some things to learn, but I’m on the right track, so I’ll mark it as resolved.