Hey all, I have very little Programming skills and am building a site using wordpress as CMS. I am using pages and posts. On one of my pages I want to have weather and tides etc, and i want it to update itself off other websites. Some examples of sites I want to use data from are: http://fishing.swellmap.com/24hr_forecast.php?region=wellington - but I'll need to have different region selections http://www.metvuw.com/forecast/forecast1.php?type=rain®ion=nz&tim=12 http://metservice.com/marine/recreational-marine/christchurch http://metservice.com/national/maps-rain-radar/maps/tasman-sea-nz-colour-latest Obivously i don't want the whole pages, just the main info, how hard would this be? I guess the pictures would just be easy as I just need to put the image location and that will update but I'm not too sure abotu the first link. Any help would be much appreciated and you will rule my world!
You could code a plug-in for WordPress that fetches the page and extracts the required information using regular expressions. That code would break though once the site changes its layout. I'm using a PHP class (http://www.phpclasses.org/package/3086-PHP-Parse-and-extract-information-from-HTML-using-SQL.html) for extracting data; it doesn't work for all applications though.
Do they have a feed or widget? That would be the quickest way. Or you would have to scrape the data and automatically have it into wordpress, complicated.
Some of the sites have RSS feeds. But for the other sites that don't, are there any wpplugins that will scrape data?
Not that I know of, Its not really possible. Its a very custom job to have custom scraper crons. You might be able to find someone on Dp to do it for a cost. But I think you could probably find some other solution/feed/widget to replace the need you have for this.
I see, I might just stick to the sites that have RSS feeds for now then. I got help with some CURL and php on another thread ( http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1942892&goto=newpost ) and have successfully turned that into a template but I just need a way to try and format it as it spits it out in a rather ugly layout.