How to associate dynamic PHP page for chosen Wordpress tag?

Question

I create some dynamic pages in Wordpress through PHP. Lots of them.

Those are not visible in Wordpress backend, as all the data is taken from different database. Each of them use signle PHP template, but have unique URL. Its working just fine.

I have also created taxonomy tags in Wordpress.

How to tell Wordpress that each of those dynamic pages with unique URLs should use specified tags?

Example: I have pets. Dogs and cats, each of them have their names.

I have tags in Wordpress: john, dog, joe, cat

I have page in Wordpress: mydomain.com/pets/

And I have dynamic pages created in PHP from external DB (as dynamic categories, not visible in Wordpress backend): mydomain.com/pets/cats/ mydomain.com/pets/dogs/

And dynamic subpages with names of pets created in PHP from external DB (also not in backend): mydomain.com/pets/cats/joe/ mydomain.com/pets/dogs/john/

How to tell Wordpress that page: mydomain.com/pets/cats/joe/ should be related to tags 'joe' and 'cat' and page: mydomain.com/pets/dogs/john/ should be related to tags 'john' and 'dog'

So if someone uses tag: mydomain.com/tag/john/ it will show him corresponding dog page........

Is it possible? I have plenty of names and a lot of pets ;)

edit: updated title

/orsz

Answer 1

Well, ideally you would want to have the data contained within the Wordpress database as you then have access to the framework for data manipulation and your data is stored in a relational way in terms of the normal Wordpress structure.

Custom post types for the pets and custom taxonomies for those post types would make sense. You could then create dynamic templates for each structure.

Why do you want to use Wordpress's tag structure for the pages if you do not use wordpress for the pages or info?

To take a stab at answering your question though, I would create custom taxonomy, lets say Animals, and make a WP page template within the theme for your post type and dynamic content:

category-animals.php 

and register your animals as children and their names as grandchildren.

Since you are not saving the data within Wordpress, you would have to provide some structure on the WP side for this to work, even if your data is generated from an external db.

The above will definitely let WP know:

How to tell Wordpress that page: mydomain.com/pets/cats/joe/ should be related to tags 'joe' and 'cat' and page: mydomain.com/pets/dogs/john/ should be related to tags 'john' and 'dog'

but Wordpress will still not have a clue about the data you present to the user.

I have not tested this as the use case is slightly strange but if your php code is with the custom category template, it should work

If you could explain what the reasoning is for keeping your data and structure outside of Wordpress that might help?

Answer 2

I feel like you are using wordpress, without the need for it.

You can create a simple php page or include that page in your default wordpress page in wich you get the tags from the url and include the needed .php file(s) in the original template page?

Using parse_url & explode you can get the tags from your url

$uri_path = parse_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PHP_URL_PATH);
$uri_segments = explode('/', $uri_path);

You can then loop these segments to incldue what you want

include $uri_segments[1].'.php';
include $uri_segments[2].'.php';

Your question is a bit unclear to understand if this is really what you are looking for.