Friday, December 18th, 2009 (updated 1 Jan ’10)

adam@engaging.net | Brighton, England

Display any database table in an ExpressionEngine template using External Entries

 
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s ExpressionEngine becomes more deeply embedded in organizations’ business processes, there’s more of a need to integrate it with other systems. The External Entries plugin helps make this easier. It also helps you manage your EE database.

The plugin enables you to select from, update, insert into and delete from a table either within your EE database or any other MySQL database on the internet to which you have administrative access. This means your site can easily import and export data to and from EE and among the backends of any number of other MySQL-based systems.

Put the plugin in its own EE template, call the template with jQuery’s “.load()”:http://api.jquery.com/load/ and “.on()”:http://api.jquery.com/on/ functions for AJAXy goodness, and your web site is now a web app!

One possible use is when deciding how to approach a catalog for ecommerce. Do you publish your product catalog as EE entries? Or as entries in your ecommerce package? Or both? This plugin could tip the balance towards keeping them in the ecommerce package only, as it enables EE to easily view, edit, create and delete them over there.

External Entries is now free and released under the GPL license. It works in both EE v1.x and v2.x.

As ExpressionEngine becomes more deeply embedded in organizations’ business processes, there’s more of a need to integrate it with other systems. The External Entries plugin helps make this easier. It also helps you manage your EE database.

The plugin enables you to select from, update, insert into and delete from a table either within your EE database or any other MySQL database on the internet to which you have administrative access. This means your site can easily import and export data to and from EE and among the backends of any number of other MySQL-based systems.

Put the plugin in its own EE template, call the template with jQuery’s “.load()”:http://api.jquery.com/load/ and “.on()”:http://api.jquery.com/on/ functions for AJAXy goodness, and your web site is now a web app!

One possible use is when deciding how to approach a catalog for ecommerce. Do you publish your product catalog as EE entries? Or as entries in your ecommerce package? Or both? This plugin could tip the balance towards keeping them in the ecommerce package only, as it enables EE to easily view, edit, create and delete them over there.

External Entries is now free and released under the GPL license. It works in both EE v1.x and v2.x.