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I'm working on a central classified website where dealers will enter their ads. This server will run PHP/MySQL. I want dealers to be able to retrieve their ads to display on their own website as well. On a dealer website, we should be able do what we usually do on a classified website like browsing ads by category and searching ads. I'm looking for the best way to achieve this. The maximum number of ads a dealer will have is about 200.

  1. I want to avoid iframe.

  2. I'm considering XML but it means I'll have to create a script for each language to parse it. And if I upgrade my script, dealers will have to update their site as well to have the latest version.

  3. JavaScript using src to call a file on the central website seems to be another option but I'm not sure it will be able to do everything I want to do like searching ads. And would it work on any platform (not sure it would work if a client has disable JavaScript in it's browser)

I'd like to have your thoughts on this so I go the right path in this project. Or if you have articles on this, let me know.

John Saunders
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Luc
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2 Answers2

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If you give a non-technical person XML, they won't know what to do with it.

Try cobranding - where your (or they) setup header/footer elements on your site, and you serve dealer1.mysite.com. They can link to it, or make a DNS entry in their own domain.

Alain Collins
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  • I totally agree with you that I can't send XML files to non-tech people. My idea is to send a bunch of files that they will upload in a directory and these files will parse the XML file as needed. – Luc Jun 04 '13 at 17:34
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You could provide an RSS endpoint that way you would be able to provide:

  • multiple items of html, text or any other type of content
  • searching/filtering the items by parsing the querystring

RSS is a standard so there is a reasonable chance that the clients are able to cope with it.

You could even have the client pass a querystring parameter that indicates the preferred format so they can decide how to display the data.

Emond
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