Using wordpress as admin interface for a search web application

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I am doing research regarding the development of a search web application.

The main purpose will be to allow users to search in a big list of entities (let's assume they are products), that refer to external websites.

Additionally, there will be articles grouped into categories, mostly separated from the search functionality and search results.

I am probably going to use Apache Solr as search backend.

My question now is, should I write the administration interface/backend completely myself, or should I use some CMS, to reuse an already existing administration interface and underlying infrastructure?

The main tasks for the editors/admins are

  • Create / edit / archive articles
  • Create / edit searchable product entries (that need to get indexed by Solr)

Is it (relatively) easy to create and manage database entities that have nothing to do with Wordpress from within the WP Admin interface? Does that mean I would need create my own plugin?

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solrwordpressbackend
I used WP many times as admin-only with Flash front-ends, it's quite easy to load a minimum WP and extract information using its default functions. Research WPSE for more info in this "light loading". - brasofilo

1 Answers

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You can create custom taxonomy with recent WordPress, so yes you can create non-article stuff and decide how it gets exposed.

You do need to figure out how to get Solr to search your WordPress content, perhaps a plugin such as Solr for WordPress or Advanced search (did not test either myself). But you need to make sure that the plugin can work with a custom taxonomy (not sure if the first one does).

Alternative, if you are not stuck with WordPress, you can look at systems that integrate Solr as one of their features, such as with Drupal or OpenCMS.