In the post Pondering a Jupyter Notebooks to WordPress Publishing Pattern: MultiMarker Map Widget, I described a simple pattern I started exploring last year that used a custom WordPress shortcode plugin to render data added to one or more custom fields associated with a WordPress post; the post text (including shortcode) and custom fields data were themselves posted into WordPress using some Python code executed from a Jupyter notebook. The idea behind that pattern was to provide a way of automating the creation of custom posts largely from a supplied data set, rendered using a generic shortcode plugin.
Another pattern I explored last year used the WordPress Transients API to cache data pulled from a 3rd party API in the WordPress database, and allow that data to be used by a custom plugin to render the post.
Here’s some example code for a plugin that renders a map containing recent planning applications on the Isle of Wight: the data is grabbed via an API from a morph.io webscraper, which scrapes the data from the Isle of Wight council website.
The two key bits of the script are where I check to see if cached data exisits ( get_transient( 'iwcurrplanningitems' ); and if it doesn’t, grab a recent copy from the API and cache it for 8 hours (set_transient('iwcurrplanningitems', $markers, 60*60*8);).
One thing I started to wonder over the custom break was whether this approach could provide a way of sharing “data2text” content. For example, having a plugin that creates a canned summary of jobseeker’s allowance figures from data cached from the ONS website? A downside of this is that I’d have to write the data2text script using PHP, which means I couldn’t directly build on related code I’ve written previously…
I also wonder if we could use custom fields to permanently store data for a particular post. For example, we might check whether or not a custom field exists for the post, and if it doesn’t we could create and populate it using data pulled from an API, (possibly keyed by plugin/shortcode parameters, or the post publication date), using a WordPress add_post_meta() function call?
