Paul Hopkins just posted on ywamkb.net his work in doing a small XML feed project that we have been wanting to do some time. What we have wanted to do is update our staff opportunities on the Go Manual Database and then be able to use the same information nationally and at a local level. The benefit of this is that staff personnel departments can update information once on ywam.org database and the changes will appear in three places simultaneously.
It is best to see this in action:
ywam.org - The staff opps in the global context.
ywam-england.com - The staff opps in the national context.
ywamharpenden.org - The staff opps in the base context.
In effect, this allows you to "drill down", see the same data presented in three different contexts. If you would like to give this a go, Paul has posted his sample script on ywamkb.net here.
I know this isn't revolutionary, but this along with initiatives like www.ywamplanet.net we will hopefully continue to promote the use of dynamic content in YWAM. Here in YWAM England, we are in the process of revamping our national website and through this revision we will be focussing on the national website serving as a portal for other YWAM entities in the country through the streaming of information from various websites.
Of course, in our situation all credit goes to Paul Hopkins. He's the jedi master of this sort of thing!
Comments
Paul's code didn't work for me
I really appreciate Paul's (and Colin's) work on this. I have been working for some time on getting all of ywam.eu's information to be pulled from Colin's feeds. We won't use it on the current version of ywam.eu, but it will definitely be integral in the next version. You can see what I have been doing with this example:
Starting with
Western Europe
The country names are pulled straight from ywam.org's feeds, then we drill down to
The Netherlands
The country info there is stored in our own database, but the oplocs are pulled again from the feed. Then on to:
Heidebeek
I have been using my own code for it (Colin helped some, but I basically had to teach myself) so I'm glad to see Paul's code. Unfortunately, his code didn't work for me. I think the reason being that the code uses fopen to retrieve an external file (which doesn't work on my server, but it may work on other servers. I just noticed he has put that in his to do at the top of the code). I use curl to retrieve the data, but I didn't work for me to replace any of his code with my curl code, since I just don't understand enough about it to work it out. I've posted my code on the talk page of his article.