How to integrate a WordPress blog into an existing website

6 comments

1. I’m not sure I have understood your problem, but I give it a try to help you 🙂

   I think the best you can do is to create your own theme in WordPress.
   It’s gonna be easy if you only want to show the blog posts, and you don’t need the navigation solution, extra widgets, special plugins and so on that WordPress can give you as a feature.

   For the sake of simplicity I tell you a possible solution very briefly:

   1. Copy the whole twentyfourteen theme (/wp-content/themes/twentyfourteen) to a new directory into /wp-content/themes directory (e.g. /wp-content/themes/my_theme).
   2. Rename the new theme and if you wish add some copyright info (all you need to do is to edit the head of the style.css file in this new directory… you might keep the reference that it is made after the original twentyfourteen theme)
   3. Select your new theme from the WordPress admin (in menu view/themes) and apply it as default.
   4. You can edit the header.php and footer.php so that it would show your own header and footer (css, javascript, navigation menu and other stuff) and delete all other things that you don’t need.
   5. You might need to edit index.php a little (e.g. delete get_sidebar(); line and / or the <?php get_sidebar( 'content' ); ?> from the end of it if you don’t want to use wordpress sidebar)
   6. Now the default features should work already… Maybe you need to pimp a little more for search and archives features. I think all you need to do is to edit or delete some files from your new template: e.g. archive.php, search.php (if you deleted search.php the search results would use index.php instead… Pretty nice fallback logic… If you’re not familiar with that, please check it here: http://codex.wordpress.org/images/1/18/Template_Hierarchy.png)

   If you success with these steps the WordPress will show your header, your css files, your scripts, your footer but the blog posts as the content body. Now you can customize every other things you need.

   I hope these ideas have given you a good start 🙂 If you need more info, let me know!

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2. One possible solution:

   • Your site in: public_html/
   • Your wordpress blog in : public_html/blog

   Add a link to your site’s menu to public_html/blog/

   On WordPress set only one page, that will be your blog. Put the blog page as Home page of WordPress, and disables the menu of wordpress

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3. Check your blog/wp-content/themes/my_theme folder and you can edit your header.php and your footer.php files to customize.

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4. As a matter of fact you could do things in a way easier manner. First, you need to have the header, footer and index. This could be done in many ways, the most commons are:

   a) get a theme you like and adapt to your needs

   b) build your own theme (as suggested)

   c) add a theme in a sub-folder (as you did)

   d) be more complex and call header from your main non-WP page

   Now, simply use the incredible power of WordPress and build all your pages inside WordPress. Create a category named “Blog” and assign blog categories to it. Depending on your selected theme, you can have only “blog” category listed on main page, have a static page, have a link on menu to blog category (and in that page, a list of posts in the blog category) or almost any possibility you could dream of. Basically, no need to complicate your life, you can have it all in a simple install and then have a CMS for all your pages, forget about double installs and stuff like that, there’s no need at all

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5. simple way to solve your issue to get the main navigation to your worpress blog can be.

   go to the
   blog/wp-content/themes/my_theme/header.php

   remove all the content from it and then just add

   include_once('file path to the main site header.php');

   to the file this will just load the header from your main site and the navigation will be same.

   Another profit to do it the way i suggested is if you make any changes to the main site navigation it will be shown on the blog also and you need not to open any files from blog to show those changes.

   Same way you can do for the footer also.

   Here you go the blog content is already in the mid of the page

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6. If all you need is the blog body why not just use The Loop

   http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop

   specifically

   define( 'WP_USE_THEMES', false );
   require('/wp-blog-header.php');
   
   if ( have_posts() ) {
       while ( have_posts() ) {
           the_post(); 
           //
           // Post Content here
           //
       } // end while
    }// end if
   

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