WhatsOnWhen provides multiple ways in which your site can integrate itself, through deep linking, into the hosted site. These vary in difficulty and scope from quick JavaScript-based feed content all the way through to more difficult XML feed implementation:

JavaScript-based Feeds

WhatsOnWhen can provide a URL to you, as a part of your hosted platform, which will give you a 'highlight' listing of a specific number of events for a specific location in our location hierarchy. This JavaScript list can then be transformed on the user's browser, into the appropriate look and feel by javascript provided by you to match your look and feel (and desired layout). If desired, it is also possible for WhatsOnWhen to allow you to use your location IDs, which we will map internally to our own location hierarchy through our flexible mapping system.

Framed, Proxied, or Included Content

For clients with frameworks capable of integrating foreign content - either through remote 'includes', proxied requests, or similar caching frameworks - content the user wishes to inline into their content can be requested. As a part of the design process, WhatsOnWhen will make available a set of URLs that load content tagged to your requirements to be directly loaded into your pages remotely, and styled as an integral part of your own page layout. This kind of seamless integration offers the best possible results - live data in a carefully controlled manner, which is transparently integrated into the page contents of pages sent to the live service.

There are several strategies for integrating using this method:

  • Content can be delivered as iframe content, loaded in by the client browser and independent from the server and page design; though iframing of our content is not a preferred mechanism of inclusion in specific circumstances.
  • Delivery can take place through a proxied request framework integrated into the client's website; clients with these frameworks can easily pull in any part of our content stream, given appropriate URL parameters, and integrate sets of our content and navigation directly into their own pages.
  • Delivery can take place through a background process which retrieves URLs from our site on an hourly, nightly, or daily basis, and loads that content into a set of static HTML files available for inclusion on the clients' own systems. This offers the easiest integration for many websites who do not wish JavaScript dependencies, and yet do not wish to use iframed or dynamic proxy frameworks in their site.

XML Feeds

WhatsOnWhen is happy to provide an XML feed to customers who wish to directly refer to content contained within the primary XML feed; at some point in the near future, a 'highlight' XML feed may be available which provides XML highlights in a schema-based format.

This mechanism allows complete and total flexibility to the client of which events appear, how those events are displayed, which event information is available, and how that information is styled and processed; however, it requires a good understanding of XML documents and XSL schema language.

For further information on our XML content delivery capabilities, please review the XML feeds documentation for the feed types you are interested in.