Question

I have a site-wide custom written search controller for my Rails 3 app and would like to include results from the site’s WordPress blog. What is the best way for me to perform a keyword search on posts from within my Rails app?

Answer 1

If you share database then just use SQL query on it. This solution gives you speed of direct db query but you’ll need to construct that query properly in order to get all relevant data.

If you don’t have access to the WP database from your Rails app then the best way will be to use curl, httparty, RestClient or any other file retrieval library.

To do that, create WordPress page with custom template which will output search results in a format which is best for you to parse in Rails app (json, xml, csv, urlencoded, whatever).

Then request that WP page from your Ruby app using curl/RestClient/httparty…

This solution gives you the power of WP template tags and functions to get the results.

Also instead of creating custom template from scratch you can just simply copy and tweak search.php from core template to provide the results in a format required by your Rails app.

With this solution you are lacking the speed of direct access to db because all search result will have to be transferred through http pipe and you have to process the data twice (encode to the proper format in WP and decode in Rails app).