How to create a wordpress plugin that will create and update custom post types from an external json feed

Question

I have created two custom post types - Seasons and Competitions what I would like to do is use data from an external api to make a wordpress plugin that will create and update these posts, I have made several attempts but so far failing to get this to work a sample of the api is:

 {"id":15,"startDate":"14-06-2014","endDate":"23-07-2015","competition":{"id":43,"name":"Champions League"},"sponsor":{"id":12,"name":"UEFA","description":"Uefa"}}``

and the code so far for the plugin:

function add_posts()
{

 $season_request    = 'https://somedomain/api/info';

$args = array(
'headers' => array(
    'Authorization' => 'Basic ' . base64_encode( user . ':' . password)
)
);
$season_response = wp_remote_get( $season_request, $args );
 $season_data = json_decode($season_response['body']);

if(! $season_data)
return false;

$query = array(
  'meta_query' => array(

    array(
         'key' =>'season_id',
         'value' => $season_data->id
    )
),

'post_type' => 'seasons',
'post_status' => array('publish', 'pending', 'draft', 'auto-draft', 'future', 'private', 'inherit'),
  'posts_per_page' => 1
 );

   $season = get_posts($query);
   $season_id = '';
   if($season)
   $season_id = $season[0] -> id;

   $season_post = array
  (
    'ID' => $season_id,
    'post_title' => $season_data -> startDate . endDate . 'test',
    'post_type' => 'seasons',
    'post_author' => 1,
    'post_status' => ($season) ? $season[0] -> post_status : 'publish'

   );

   $season_id = wp_insert_post($season_post);



  }

I'm relatively new to php(not to coding) so it may be something glaringly obvious that I can't see. I thought that this would be something that there would be some detailed documentation on but if there is it seems to be hidden from me pretty well. Any help or pointers in the right direction would be really appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

The correct way to call the external api was as follows:

$data_request    = 'https://yoururlforapihere/api/data';
$username = 'user';
$password = 'password';

$headers = array( 'Authorization' => 'Basic ' . base64_encode("$username:$password" ) );
$data_response = wp_remote_get( $data_request, array( 'headers' =>$headers, 'sslverify' => false));

Once the data was coming in properly the rest became more straightforward.