Question

I am building my site base on the product data provided by the vendor. All product related pages are sitting on the vendor’s site.

The vendor allows me to create a “product summary” link to use it as a post in WordPress. Basically the post contains a list of products with brief infomation.

If I click on one of the products, it will take me to the “product detail” page which again it sits on the vendor’s server.

At this point all I can do is show the “product summary” post as a teaser on my front page.

What I really want to use as a teaser on the front page is a few products instead of product summary.

I used file_get_contents() to echo the product detail on my “detail” post:

function demo_file_get_contents(){
    if(is_page('detail')){
       echo file_get_contents('http://vendorsite.com/product.html');
    }
}
add_action('wp_head','demo_file_get_contents');

Then I tried to capture the “green color” attribute, so I can assign this product to a “green” category and show the product as a group of green colored products teasers on the front page.

function demo_retriveAttr(){
  if(is_page('detail')){
     ?>            
        <script type="text/javascript">                
          jQuery(document).ready(function() {   
            $('#color').load('http://mysite.com/detail.html #product-color');            
          });
        </script>
      <?php
  }
}
add_action('wp_footer','demo_retriveAttr');

My questions are:

1. Is file_get_contents the best practice to capture external data?
2. the .load() function didn’t work, what did I do wrong?

Answer 1

Quick Answers

1. The file_get_contents is a good one, if your server has access to the website.
2. If the .load() function didn’t work, you might have to enable CORS. Cross Domain requests are generally blocked by the browser for safety.