API Page Creation

Hi,

I'm pulling data from my rental softwares API, I get back an array with various products in. Is it possible for squarespace to create a page for each of the products in the array from a template page?

Cheers

Yes, but it would require custom coding that exceeds the scope of free forum coding tips. 

I built something similar for a holiday company. 

The process was:

• Parse the api data and save it as session storage
• Build filterable price/availability grid
• Build various widgets that allow the stored data to be presented on category and product pages. 

The time to specify, design, build and test was significant. Days rather than hours. 

Here’s the site - https://www.bigweekends.com

1) You could use built-in Squarespace functionality to Import Products from CSV. This will create a Products collection for you, people often do this

2) Second way is to use additional custom code and create Blog with some more logic, my cases:

•  https://www.gi-escr.org/caselaw  Articles created from Google Spreadsheet
•  https://www.20ftradio.net/archive Articles created from Mixcloud feed https://www.mixcloud.com/20ftradio/

So I may code for you if it is really time consuming to create manually

3) And third way is pulling your content  from your rental API (with jsonp or proxy server or what way it supports to fetch the data) and build page dynamically on frontend. But Squarespace is giving 404 for non-exist urls, so probably your urls will look like /property?url=my-property-url-there or something that way

The third option is probably best but how would I go about this? I'm new to squarespace

1 minute ago, HarryBilney said:

The third option is probably best but how would I go about this? I'm new to squarespace

That is not something Squarespace specific really, dynamic pages and content is as simple as fetch data, parse and append to page.

Ah so i can just use php with javascript to create dynamic pages?

Squarespace doesn’t support server side programming, so PHP is not an option. It would need to be a client side JavaScript solution. 

6 minutes ago, HarryBilney said:

Ah so i can just use php with javascript to create dynamic pages?

No php as @colin.irwin said but sometimes your rental API allows to fetch things with just browser JS, also if your rental API allows to export to CSV or XML - it may also be an option to upload that file somewhere and fetch it.

What about me - I prefer 2 way I described - you just hit the button and got articles generated in seconds (or minutes if many). And you do not need to think about search engines and metatags/JSON-LD generating because you have regular Squarespace blog articles, so things are already there (or additional may be added in the moment of generation article)

On 10/15/2019 at 1:51 PM, michaeleparkour said:

1) You could use built-in Squarespace functionality to Import Products from CSV. This will create a Products collection for you, people often do this

2) Second way is to use additional custom code and create Blog with some more logic, my cases:

•  https://www.gi-escr.org/caselaw  Articles created from Google Spreadsheet
•  https://www.20ftradio.net/archive Articles created from Mixcloud feed https://www.mixcloud.com/20ftradio/

So I may code for you if it is really time consuming to create manually

3) And third way is pulling your content  from your rental API (with jsonp or proxy server or what way it supports to fetch the data) and build page dynamically on frontend. But Squarespace is giving 404 for non-exist urls, so probably your urls will look like /property?url=my-property-url-there or something that way

Hi Michael, 

I'm trying to link my newly built squarespace website with BaseLinker API but I'm told I need a custom piece of code. Can you help me ? 

Thanks, 

Callum

@Callum84 not familiar with that one. What do you need achieve? better DM me 

Hi @michaeleparkour 

How would you go about pulling data from a spreadsheet to generate blog posts? 

Thanks

5 hours ago, saulkatz said:

Hi @michaeleparkour 

How would you go about pulling data from a spreadsheet to generate blog posts? 

Thanks

I actually have that - no body content as this is complex task, but titles, excerpts, images, tags/categories - sure. Plan to release soon