Monthly Archives: September 2009

Lately, there certainly has been a lot of buzz around the thought of combining WordPress and Magento.  If you enjoy using WordPress for your CMS, but want to use Magento as your E-Commerce platform here are some options for you.

Lucky for most Magento users, there is an extension that will integrate Magento and WordPress with minimal effort. You may find the extension as well as the installation instructions here: Lazzymonks WordPress Integration 2.61

Personally, the extension did not offer what I was looking for, which was control over the SEO permalinks function in WordPress.  However, in the future the Lazzymonks extension may offer the ability to pick whatever permalinks setting you want in WordPress. 

So, where I started was at the following tutorial: Tutorial: Integrating 3rd Party CMS Content Within Magento. 

The tutorial was originally written for Expression Engine, but could be used for any CMS, including WordPress.  I was able to successfully integrate Magento and WordPress starting with the tutorial above.  However, there were some additional changes that had to be incorporated to meet the needs of my organization.

For one, I needed to make sure the RSS feeds out of WordPress could be easily viewed from the integration.  With the default integration above, this was not necessarily possible depending upon your site’s folder structure.  However, with a few lines of code, I was able to easily navigate from the header links generated by WordPress.

Another issue was the WordPress header information.  This required editing the Magento template to accomodate for the WordPress header information.  Most importantly for me, I wanted the WordPress page title to be the title of the Magento page.  This was possible by altering the Magento page template that would house the WordPress section of the website by excluding the title tags. At this point the WordPress title would begin to show up in the browser.

Then lastly, I had to find a WordPress template to fit the Magento template. Then edit the WordPress template until it looked good inside Magento.

And that was it.  Not so bad.  I’m sure there are some more/better possibilites on how to integrate WordPress and Magento, but for the time being this has worked for me.