Add external data to wordpress website page each time it loads

hans gruber · 2 Oct 2022 at 18:39

I have a wordpress website built using elementor. We book appointments using an excel spreadsheet. Each time this spreadsheet updates I can use VBA to create a file with available appointments. This could be another spreadsheet, or a text file etc.

I would like my website to use this data and display it in a contact page.

My questions are:

What would be the best format to save the data for it to be imported?
Where do I save it? I can save it in a google drive or FTP it to my site.
How do I get it into my wordpress webpage?

Can anyone help or point me in the right direction? I would like the wordpress page to load this data each time the page loads. A lot of tutorials are about manually importing data once and that's the end.

touch · 2 Oct 2022 at 22:03

I'd say the simplest solution for you would be to create some html in your VBA (just a table showing availability or something) and save it as a plain HTML file then FTP it up to your site and use an iframe to display that page on your contact form.

A more elegant (and much more complex) solution would be to use VBA send the updated data directly to the website:
-I don't know VBA but from a quick Google you can use WinHttpRequest to send a request to your site with the updated data.
-create a PHP page on your WordPress site to accept this request and update the database accordingly.
-your contact page then reads this data from the database and displays it

visibleman · 3 Oct 2022 at 10:44

As @touch says, generating HTML or even JSON and getting Wordpress to use that data would be one of the simplest solutions. Although if you do opt for storing data in a DB (for the site), just make sure you add protection, and not leaving it open to third-parties, on whatever is handling the incoming data.

hans gruber · 3 Oct 2022 at 11:10

I've had a play with iframe and it works well. I can easily create a html table and ftp it to my site, so it's looking promising.

hans gruber · 5 Oct 2022 at 19:33

Just thought I'd update. Got this up and running. It was easier than I thought. Html created in vba as you close spreadsheet and winscp to folder on site, then iframe. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.