I’m using WordPress to manage posts in my website, but I don’t want to use WordPress template/visualization. I will use it only to manage the content and program a bit to display the content in my website.
Well, I can access the WordPress database and load the content with my own queries. But I want to know if is viable to use WordPress to create the bridge between my site and the WordPress database.
Simplifying, I want to know if WordPress provides methods like getAllPosts(), getAllComments that already manage the database connection, queries and returns some objects or I need to build this in my application.
Not native wordpress, but this is very “viable” through plugins. Example: http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-posts-api/ that claims to do what you want for posts, and you could expand to load comments as well – or you may find an exact plug in that you want with a bit of searching.
I’ve never actually used one written by someone else for this, but have built similar functionality to expose posts etc for XML feeds (then displayed in Flash, for example). Relatively easy if you start with someone else’s plug-in and expand.
Just one word of warning – these plugins are great as the operate in the full WordPress environment, so are easy to run. The downside is that they operate in the full WordPress environment, and are therefore inefficient under high stress. If you’re going to hammer it, I’d write a caching buffer first, and only make the full call to WordPress when the cache expires.