A WordPress plugin that keeps lottery results up to date by itself

The site reviews online lotteries, and its pages showed results as static images, so every new draw left old data on it. The owner wanted real results, the next draw and the biggest jackpots, updated with no one touching them. The data existed in separate sources with different fields, and none of it was on the site.

I started with the data. I studied and documented the main lottery API and compared it with a lottery operator’s feed, and only then planned the widgets. I built it as a separate plugin, so a new theme does not break it. Both sources write into the plugin’s own tables, and a currency API converts the jackpots. Lottery data refreshes every 8 hours, currency rates once a day.

Three widgets go in by shortcode: results with history, the next draw and the top jackpots. The table adapts to the width of its column, since it sits in columns of different sizes. The owner’s SEO check found that the history table was really two tables, one of them hidden, so I rebuilt it as one real table with a header row.

On the owner’s host the scheduled jobs and outgoing requests failed, while locally they worked. I diagnosed it and made the case for a plugin that works out of the box on any hosting. I assessed a third data source by the number of requests it would need, and the owner parked it.

I showed the plugin to the owner on calls and handed it over on staging with a how-to guide. After handover I traced a draw-date bug to the query, and showed that many «missing» widgets were gaps in the source data itself.

I delivered the plugin in December 2022, and the owner installed it on his site. His pages got fresh results, the next draw and the top jackpots from live data, with no one updating them by hand.