Joomla & WordPress Together – a Marriage Made in Heaven
To my mind being able to have a WordPress blog for a Joomla website is the perfect union. WordPress, considered to be the best blogging platform and Joomla, one of the most powerful Content Management Systems working hand in hand together on the same site would be a marriage made in heaven.
I already had a Joomla 1.7 site and was looking to court a suitable blogging bride. At first I considered a paid Joomla blog arrangement; spending cash on a Joomla blogging tool such as Easyblogger at $59 which is a good looking prospect and may make life easy or WordPress for Joomla at $70/year which would give me the essence of that WordPress blog that I hankered after (or would that be like marrying the sister-in-law?).
I had 3 questions to answer first before going down the aisle with either of these potential suitors.
- Could the best blog for Joomla actually be the true and full WordPress, my first true love, with all it's blogging benefits?
- Could they then be joined as one (in a tasteful way) so that my WordPress blog looked as a part of my Joomla site with latest posts featured on my site pages and not have to be a technical wizz to achieve it?
- Could I do it all without spending any money at all?
As you may guess the answer to these 3 questions turned out to be yes (otherwise this would be a very short blog post!). You can see how the two tied the knot at my Joomla site web-marketing-advisor.co.uk and my WordPress blog web-marketing-advisor.co.uk/blog where they are living happily ever after.
Here is the guide to how to add a WordPress blog for Joomla websites, for non-techies.
Where to install WordPress
Getting WordPress itself is just a matter of installing it to the directory where you want it to live. It does not have to be in the root domain but can be in a directory called, yes you guessed it, /blog. So for me that meant installing in web-marketing-advisor/blog. By the way, I did all of this on my localhost copy of my site first. I suggest you do the same. WordPress has a very quick and easy installation process.
So now I had WordPress and could add blog posts (I don't use the WordPress pages, I have Joomla for my static pages), but with the default twentyEleven theme it didn't look very much like the rest of my site.
The right WordPress theme
My next step was to search for a theme (free of course) that I would be able to easily manipulate to give me the ability to make it look or be pretty close to the look of my Joomla site. The one I plumped for was Suffusion by Sayontan Sinha. The reason being it had options for just about every aspect of the look and feel that could be set from a comprehensive theme admin page(s). I did end up adding a little bit of custom css code but that was through choice rather than necessity, I could achieve a pretty close likeness to my Joomla theme by just using the Suffusion theme options.
I also liked Sayontans words that greeted me after installation when I opened the theme options page... Don't panic! in large font, yes it does look complicated at first but that's only because it's so flexible. I soon got the hang of it.
Transferring the Joomla look to the WordPress blog
Going through each option I was able to add my logo, set background colours etc as well as configuring the WordPress blog layout. I would suggest using Suffusion or a theme that offers similar flexibility unless you are comfortable with getting your coding gloves on.
On my Joomla site some of the look (menus in particular) was achieved through the use of images. To use the same images so that I achieved the same look on the blog I used the Firebug addon for Firefox to call up the image paths and filenames,
and then plugged those images into the appropriate option in the Suffusion theme,
so my blog was now using the same graphical elements as my Joomla site and was looking pretty similar.
In the WordPress backend I added a main navigation menu to match my Joomla site menu with custom links to the appropriate pages of my site.
So now I have my blog looking like it is part of my Joomla site (ok if you look closely you will be able to see some minor differences which I'm sure I could fix but it's not been major enough to reach the top of my to do list yet.)
WordPress blog for Joomla - Hooking up
The next part completes the integration allowing me to feature my WordPress blog categories and posts on my Joomla site. And this is where the magic of Joomla comes to the fore. With it's extensive development community behind it there is almost always a plugin for anything that you might want to add, and connecting Joomla with WordPress is no exception.
To do the job I turned to Jesus Vargus's simple but excellent WordPress Posts plugin. After installation I created modules of type 'WordPress Posts' and allocated them to an appropriate position. I have created one at the bottom of my content on the home page and another in my sidebar on other pages. I then set up the module parameters. The database connection details you will need are the ones for your WordPress blog and can be found in the WordPress config file that you set up during the install.
I set the home page module to show my 3 latest blog posts with the first 180 characters as intro text. The readmore buttons (see home page extract below) are a bit of custom css that I decided to add, but you don't have to.
The blog topics listed on my home page and sidebar are just created with custom HTML modules where I add hyperlinks to the category pages of my blog. Here's what it looks like on my home page.
Troubleshooting WordPress blog for Joomla
WordPress uses a fair amount of memory, a typical symptom of this is a white screen when trying to navigate to the blog or the WordPress backend. To allocate more memory add the following line to your WordPress config file immediately below the define('WPLANG', ''); line.
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '50M');
You might get a database connection problem if you are installing your Joomla site at the same time. I would suggest deactivating the WordPress Post modules until you have everything else installed and if necessary install the WordPress blog first then the Joomla site second and then activate the WordPress Posts modules.
I'm still in the honeymoon period with my Joomla site and WordPress blog but all seems to be rosy so far. Let me know how you get on in the comments or any alternative recommendations. I wish you a long and happy WordPress with Joomla marriage!
Image Credit: thisispworks brand & corporate identity design
Guest post by: Pete Stevens is a website marketing consultant from Yorkshire in the UK who focusses on making websites for business success. If you found this post helpful then consider visiting his blog and subscribing to receive website related blog posts automatically.
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