Interfacing django and PHP apps, best approach?

Question

I've got a django application and a WordPress install on the same server. The public website is WordPress and the django app deals with some aspects of the website.

(The site is a theatre website, the django app deals with upcoming shows and ticket reservations)

The way I'm interfacing this at the moment is django outputting bare-bones HTML and WordPress pulling it in like this:

<?php
$data=file_get_contents('http://localhost:8000/list');
echo $data;
?>

While the ticket reservation requires an iframe-ed form.

My question is, is there a better way? Would using JSON be better? If the content was pulled in with javascript it would allow more caching on the WordPress side. Is SOAP something to use?

---

The django app is this: https://github.com/wjdp/nt-tickets

Answer 1

The best way would be to create an API that your public facing site can use. This way any site, app or program could use your API.

Take a look at TastyPie and API framework for Django, it's very simply to implement.