Integration into Wordpress

[FordOwnersClubs]

(sorry for the influx of questions from me )

I've become familiar with Wordpress in the recent months, and looking at VL, I would potentially like to add the toplist into a page on Wordpress, along with the other elements, categories, new members etc.

Is this even possible? If so, would it be the dreaded quest to find a mod to handle the PHP code? If so, then I wouldn't bother as most of the scripts out there don't do a great job of it.

Regards

Jim

 

[Mark]

no problem, questions are gooood

1) simply install VL in a subfolder or subdomain of your blog and manually integrate your WP layout design into VL skin.
2) use RSS feeds (or custom mySQL queries) to share content between the 2 installs

if you need user login integration between the 2 then you start getting into more complex territory, otherwise the above is quite easy.

 

[FordOwnersClubs]

Hi Mark,

Thanks again for the speedy reply.

Unfortunately the above is probably out of my ability (in fact most is).

How would I even get the different page to display?

Obviously in wordpress I would create a page for join, stats etc as well as the main toplist index, profile etc, would I insert the wrapper.html content into the wordpress page? I know there's more than just that, but don't know where to start?!

 

[Mark]

well not really all that much too it, but coming at it from the right angle is certainly the key and no doubt some HTML / PHP experience is required, depending on how far you want to take the integration.

You dont need to create the join and stats pages, those are already part of VL. All you need to do is add links to your wordpress installation linking to those VL pages, then add links to your VL installation that point back to your wordpress site, once they share the same design it will appear seamless even though at this point they are not integrated in anyway except sharing the same layout and CSS.

Then you'll want to use some PHP script like magpie or simple_xml function to share information between the 2 (like new members, top ranked from the topsite, recent posts to the topsite from the blog). Connecting to MySQL and querying the database for data is also not a bad solution for this.. But all of this does require some coding time/skill.

To start, install VL in a subdomain like top.yoursite.com and make it look the same as your WP install by editing skins/parabola/wrapper.html, this is fairly easy but will take some HTML/CSS understanding.

 

[Anna]

Thank you for asking the Q Jim! And thanks to Mark for answering the Q! I kind of think I know what you are talking about, but will delegate to bf to find out if it is doable on our end! Do you know about any "edit skins for dummies" site?