Question

I want to display on my WordPress website using MapMyFitness’s API. It needs to be in a friendly format for my readers so I am thinking it can be converted into posts. Should I write a script that would directly pull this data from their servers (during each page refresh) or should I create and schedule a cron job for it? I do like the idea of creating a cron job for it (since my site will need to keep track of ratings and comments for each route), but I am not sure where to start for it.

Here’s a URL I would be using to grab data from:

http://api.mapmyfitness.com/3.1/routes/get_route?&o=xml&r=&route_key=&route_id=15219484&created_date=&old_json=&loc=

There API does support JSON, so the &o= parameter can be set to “&o=Json”.

Here’s a link to the API I am using: api.mapmyfitness.com/3.1/

And here’s a link to the Routes method which is being used in the link above. It shows how you can manipulate the data: api.mapmyfitness.com/3.1/routes/get_route?doc

Please let me know if I should provide anymore details about what I am trying to accomplish.

Answer 1

there’s a few ways you could go about this..

but to keep it simple you could just use a XML parser to read the xml returned from the API,
this xml file, you can do what you want with it, adding pages/posts for each route?

are you using, google maps to display the route points?

heres a little code block that you could use in your wordpress sidebar.

open sidebar.php

pop this little code snippet in there.

$url = "http://api.mapmyfitness.com/3.1/routes/get_route?&o=xml&r=&route_key=&route_id=15219484&created_date=&old_json=&loc=";
$xml= simplexml_load_file($url);

foreach($xml->output as $output){
   echo "User: ".$output->user->username."<br/>";
   echo "RouteName: ".$output->route_name;
   echo "<ul>";
   //loop through each point
   foreach($output->points as $point){
       echo "<li>Lat: ".$point->point->lat." Long: ".$point->point->lng."</li>";
   }
   echo "</ul>";
}

this should produce a list
User: mm75 RouteName: All PANTHER TRACE – Riverview FL Mar 31, 2010 1:14 PM

• Lat: 27.81178 Long: -82.330725
• Lat: 27.81178 Long: -82.330725

etc..etc..etc..

hopefully this puts you on track, 🙂

Marty