I’m working on an Ruby on Rails exercise listing application (https://rbzexercise.herokuapp.com) and I’m trying to integrate it with a WordPress site (http://www.rubberbanditz.com). Is there an easy way to do the integration? As you can see, both are pretty established, so I’d really prefer not to have to rewrite either. Right now i’m using a work around that involves an iframe within the page http://rubberbanditz.com/exercise-library/, but we don’t get any of the “google juice” from it.
Update:
Based on the comments, I’ve started looking into integrating the app to exercise.rubberbanditz.com, but following the directions at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains doesn’t seem to be doing the job. when going to exercise.rubberbanditz.com i just automatically get forwarded to the main page. Does anyone have any experience with setting a rails app to a subdomain, and can you point me to a good tutorial?
Thanks for any help!
Jason
Your iframe method is fine, but might lead to seo problems, since all of your links are trapped in the iframe.
Another option would be to take your WordPress theme and rebuild it in your
/app/views/layouts/application.html.erbtemplate. Once that’s done, make a subdomain (maybe app.rubberbanditz.com or workouts.rubberbanditz.com) and setup your heroku app to use the new subdomain.Google should view the two subdomains as the same website, especially if you’re sharing common navigation elements, and both sites link to each other frequently.
The biggest downside is that now you’ll have to update your design in two different places, which can be a huge pain in the ass.
I’ve used this approach before, running-php-inside-a-rails-app, for running php inside a rails application. Not sure if anything extra will be required for wordpress since I was just rendering a single page.