This was an exciting project that really pushed the limits of what WordPress was capable of. The client was looking to set up a Mobile Phone affiliate site. The problem was there were literally hundreds of models and tens of thousands of deals – it just wouldn’t be possible to keep such a huge amount of data up to date by hand.
In order to deal with this, I developed a custom plugin that reads the mobile phone feeds – themselves presented in a number of different formats – and allowed the user to map the data within the feeds to different data fields within the site. Once this was done, the plugin would automatically check for changes every day. If that sounds complicated, it is!
In order to handle this complex beast, I created a custom administration panel designed to take some of the pain out of dealing with huge sets of data.
Most of the site is automated, reading in the files on a daily basis and checking for any changes to the phone deals. If new phones are added to the feeds, they are automatically incorporated into the site. The site creates pages for each individual model and sorts the deals according to their type – e.g. Contract, Pay As You Go, etc. – with very little user intervention required.
There were many problems that needed to be overcome for this plugin to be successful. Having hundreds of thousands of database rows and thousands of WordPress pages can cause sites to run very slowly so a lot of time was spent optimising both the database and WordPress to make sure that we were seeing acceptable load times.
