Question

I have been asked to create a dial on a wordpress website. The customer wants to be able to update the value of the gauge.

I have two options – I can either create something that sits alongside wordpress where they can update the value, or I can have it as part of wordpress, but I am not sure how to do that or how easy it would be.

Basically I just need a screen where an authenticated user can update a value. I then need to be able to read that value from one of the theme files (specifically the static front page theme file) and display it.

I am comfortable with PHP, but not familiar with wordpress – is there any easy way to do this, or will it make more sense to just do it separately?

Answer 1

It should be pretty easy actually – WordPress provides the core of what you need to interact with the database.

Here’s some sample code of a theme I built a few years back. There’s more to it than this, obviously you have to create the table at some point. But once that is in place, the global $wpdb is your gateway.

function update_game($player, $field, $data)
{
    global $wpdb;

    $table = $wpdb->prefix . "gameplay";
    $where = "tex_id=" . ($player);

    $sql = "UPDATE $table SET " .$field. "='" .$data. "' WHERE $where";

    $wpdb->query( $sql );

} //End update_game

Alternatively for just a one field, you could use the “options”. e.g.

function clear_game()
{
    update_option('tex_deal','w');
    update_option('tex_dealer','0');
    update_option('tex_actor','0');
    update_option('tex_candeal','0');
    update_option( 'tex_flopImg' , '' );
    update_option( 'tex_turnImg' , '' );
    update_option( 'tex_riverImg' , '' );
    update_option( 'tex_pot' , '0' );
    update_option( 'tex_bigbet' , '0' );

}//end clear_game

update_option() is/was in /wp-includes/function.php (I presume it’s still there… it’s been a while) and you would need to call an add_option before hand – get_option() will return the current value.