Is anyone on here a Wordpress Developer?

[Frimley111R]

I have a couple of technical questions about building a site in Wordpress and want to know how easy something is (or is not) to do. Many thanks.

 

[UKcentric]

We are WordPress developers. What do you want to know?

 

[fisicx]

Me too.

What is it you need help with?

 

[makeusvisible]

Shoot, whats your question?

 

[Xtm_Mike]

Almost anything a website can do, Wordpress can do.. it's just PHP after all.. whether it's the right platform for the job is the question.

 

[Frimley111R]

Thanks for the replies guys!

Ok, so this concerns news aggregators/websites. These (as you probably know) collate news information from a variety of sources and then either post directly into your site or wait until you release the item (curated).

I like the way the BBC App works, with scrolling (left to right) news items under different categories. I think its clear and simple to use.

So, to my question, can the news items be released into on the these specific scrolling sections? For example if the item has specific tags to identify it as relevant to a specific section it get released into that section?

Finally, (as I'm here, have your attention and you may know), can news aggregators pull from social media pages? For example a specific page in Facebook.

 

[fisicx]

If you have access to the data then displaying it on a Wordpress site is a doddle. It's just a matter of organising the strings and styling the output.

Displaying data from a Facebook page is equally easy, all you need to do is add a plugin and fill in the API keys. However, styling this feed isn't so easy as Facebook has strict rules on what you can and can't do.

 

[Xtm_Mike]

Getting the data in should be fairly easy.. If you own the Facebook page you can use the API and a plugin to grab latest posts. It is also correct that you can easily tag or categorise posts and have them appear in the relevant section.

I think "styling the output" is a bit of a broad statement.. You will need considerable experience with CSS and/or jQuery/JS scripting languages to be able to do it, and do it right... It depends how far you want to go with it. If you want a carbon copy of the BBC app then it will take some work to get it right on a website.

Look into a slider package like unslider.js - You can essentially put each category/section in a slide and then apply touch and mouse gestures to allow it to be scrolling by clicking/pressing and dragging. http://unslider.com/ - Look at the examples. You would just need to replace the dots with the category titles... There may also be specific or better integrated WP plugins to achieve this.

You will also need to consider how this falls back to desktop.