Background: I’ve worked with Django and Vue.js before, but WordPress is really puzzling me. I need to create a site for an academic project that shows analytics and charts for a large collection of documents and their properties. The catch is that I’m required to use WordPress as the main platform.
My Questions:
- Can I connect external APIs to WordPress?
- Is it possible to run server-side scripts or handle dynamic content?
- What’s the optimal setup for managing changing data even though updates won’t happen often?
Current Situation: I’m using a WordPress instance through my college. When I log in and try to modify things, I don’t see many options for deep customization. I’m stuck on how to integrate APIs or handle data that changes over time.
What approach would work best for this kind of project?
The limited customization options you’re seeing suggest your college WordPress instance is likely hosted and restricted. This is common with institutional setups where they limit plugin installations and code modifications for security reasons. You might want to check with your IT department about what’s actually allowed on their platform before diving too deep into development.
Regarding your technical questions - WordPress can definitely handle API connections through custom plugins or functions.php modifications, but this requires coding access which you might not have. For server-side processing, WordPress runs on PHP so you can execute backend logic, though again this depends on your hosting restrictions. The REST API is built into modern WordPress installations which could help with your analytics display needs.
Given your Django background, you might find WordPress development workflow quite different. Instead of the clean separation you’re used to, WordPress mixes content management with application logic. If you have the permissions, consider creating a custom plugin specifically for your document analytics rather than trying to hack theme files. This keeps your code organized and makes it easier to manage your changing data requirements.
honestly wordpress can be frustating coming from django but the trick is using headless setup. keep wordpress as backend for content managment and build your frontend with vue.js like you know already. the wp rest api will give you all the data you need and you can handle the charts/analytics on the frontend side where you have full control.
WordPress development becomes much more manageable once you understand the hook system and custom post types. Since you’re dealing with academic document analytics, I’d recommend creating custom post types for your documents and using custom fields to store metadata. This gives you structured data that’s easier to query and display. For API integration, the wp_remote_get() and wp_remote_post() functions work well for external connections. I’ve used these extensively for pulling data from research databases. You can set up scheduled tasks using wp_cron() to update your document collection periodically without manual intervention. The chart display part is where JavaScript libraries like Chart.js or D3 become valuable. WordPress handles the data management while your frontend scripts create the visualizations. Custom endpoints through the REST API let you serve JSON data to your charts efficiently. One thing that helped me transition from traditional frameworks was thinking of WordPress themes as view layers and plugins as your application logic. Keep your analytical functions in a custom plugin rather than theme files, especially since academic projects often need to persist beyond theme changes.