November 13, 2006

Embedding WordPress

(aka WordPress as a content editor for the really, really lazy)

The best way to create websites that users can manage themselves is to use a proper content management system like Drupal (our current favorite). This is exactly the right thing to do if you have a reasonable amount of time, and especially if you’re building a site from scratch.

If the time or money is lean, you can cheat. WordPress is a fabulous piece of software designed to run weblogs, but is really easy to install and get running, and can be used as a content management system. Indeed, we’ve built a few sites on WordPress.

In one case recently, we wanted to retrofit an existing site with some content management capabilities. We’ve done this with Movable Type before, because MT generates static files, which are easily included in other pages using PHP includes or the like. The web host this client uses had PHP and MySQL capabilities, but not perl, so Movable Type was out and WordPress was in. The goal was to embed WordPress content in existing page templates without having to run the whole site in WordPress (not enough time available to go through that process — it’s not overly laborious, but it takes more time than we had for this project). Embedding WordPress content in other pages is quite easy; here’s how you can do it.

1. Install WordPress, configure it however you want. In our case, we set up a category for each page to be edited (two of them here). Note the category ID numbers (probably 1, 2, and so on) for the categories you’re using — you’ll need them later.

2. Write and publish posts in each of the categories, paste in the current HTML content. You can strip out paragraph and line break tags. Your content is now ready to be embedded elsewhere.

3. Create a PHP file somewhere appropriate called wp_start.php. In it, paste code like this:

   <?php
       // turn off WordPress themes and include the WordPress core:
       define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
       require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');
   ?>
   

   Obviously, you might need to update the require line to point to the right wordpress location.

4. In the page you want to edit, include your wp_start.php file, then insert this code where you want your content to appear:

   <?php
       // get the most recent post(s) in category 1
       // change category=1 as needed for whatever page you're embedding
       // (in this case, just we're getting just one post, but it could be more)
       $lastposts = get_posts('numberposts=1&category=1');
   
   
   // spit out the content of the post(s)
   foreach($lastposts as $post) {
       setup_postdata($post);
       the_content(); 
   }
   
   
   ?>
   

That’s it. Load the page in your browser, and you should see your content. You could, of course, do other things to get your content out — check out the WordPress documentation for more information on the template tags and functions that are available. There are probably a bunch of ways to do this, even using the same tools, so if you have something interesting to share, please leave a comment.

Thanks to Michael Wender for his post on how to embed WordPress in OSCommerce, which pointed the way to this procedure, in particular demonstrating how dead-easy it is to instantiate WordPress.

Posted by Joe