Custom Page vs Plugin Slug

Question

I'm currently integrating information from a third party API into a wordpress site. What i need to do is create a "dynamic page" where it displays the details of a specific record from the API. Since there are 1000's of records i dont want to create a seperate page in wordpress for every record detail view.

I've been looking around and it seems there are two main solutions (i've discarded the custom post type option as i dont think it fits my needs, but im open to re-evaluate). The first is to create a page in the wordpress pages admin, then setup a custom template for that page which calls the API methods, then just builds the template. The second is to somehow use the plugin i created, to register a hook for the URL im using, then have the plugin handle the display (not sure how i go about that yet).

I'm wondering what people here think is the best approach. The prerequisites are:

1. To be able to handle the URL to retrieve the ID for the record to display (must support standard URL param's as well as custom slugs).
2. To have a custom template (with the ability to call the get_sidebar() function as its widgetised)
3. At some point i will be adding an administration panel to add additional content to each record detail display such as related images, which are not supported by the external CMS.

Any advice or a point in the best direction would be appreciated, thanks

Answer 1

I ran into this the week while writing a custom API (REST + JSON) for a WordPress site I was working on. My solution was to use a page-template and use that as the entry point for the API. That's when I came across https://stackoverflow.com/a/4975004/1386140. The one catch, though, is that it would require the user (admin of the site) to title the page to match the parameter that the plugin checks against

$wp->query_vars["pagename"] == 'YOUR_PAGE_NAME'

For my purpose, this was more than sufficient, especially since we redirected irrelevant traffic. This allows additional query parameters in the URL, though doesn't play friendly with slugs. Since it will still be called as a typical page methods like get_sidebar() would still work.

To get it to work with slugs, I would look at this post ( https://stackoverflow.com/a/2487407/1386140 ) to get started in the right direction (looks legit, but I haven't worked with custom rewrite rules and plugins before).