CMS and combinations with wordpress?

[toplisek]

Website is based on smarty framework.

I like to know how to do it when I like to have advanced CMS.

Should I create separate CMS like Joomla and Drupal and also Wordpress or I use Drupal system for blogs?

What are updated trands in this combinations?

[ergophobe]

Honestly, I use either one or the other, but don't combine two systems together. It doesn't cause issues per se, but it just makes it a bit harder to create an integrated navigation and so forth.

[lexipixel]

"it just makes it a bit harder to create an integrated navigation and so forth"
-ergo

Not necessarily -- with a little pre-planning, it can all peacefully coexist.

I find using WordPress pages too cumbersome for some needs and use it with a CMS on several sites. Other times I want to blend a WordPress blog into a legacy site and don't want to convert all the existing content to WP pages.

Consider that basic HTML page layouts of most sites use some combination of the following "sections":

leader - something appearing ahead of "the page", e.g. a leaderboard ad or special notice

header - customarily a site logo and some other stuff appearing ahead of navigation and "content"

topnav - a top toolbar (pulldowns, buttons, etc)

leftnav - left side vertical navigation menu

content - the actual content that makes "this page" different than others

rightnav - more nav stuff on right, maybe some ads...

bottomnav - links / buttons etc for "policies", sitemap, etc.

footer - common footer links, copyright, etc.

trailer - maybe a "leaderboard" ad or block of adsense, etc.


If you design your WordPress theme and CMS using CSS with PHP include() statements, (or other method of SSI), you can fairly easily maintain a set of stub files that contain all the chunks of code that are common to both the WordPress portion of the site and the parts of the site handled by a CMS, static pages or other applications.

You would run the WordPress loop in the "content" area, and include the rest into the customary WordPress theme files.

You can also backfeed WordPress content into the CMS or any static pages.

Here's a file I use to pull the latest WordPress posts into a static homepage on a couple sites that blend WordPress with my homegrown perl based CMS that generates static pages.

<?php
// ===========
// wp-latest.php
// ===========
// Last Updated: 2010-06-15
// By: Randy Harris ([e-mail])
//
// This stub file is designed to be included into a static HTML
// file, and will cause the latest post excerpts from a WordPress
// blog to be inserted into the HTML page.
//
// *NOTE: your web server must be configured for SSI or the calling page needs to be PHP and use the include() statement.
//
// The file is included using the HTML Server Side Include (SSI) tag*:
//
// <!--#include virtual="/dir/subdir/wp-latest.php" -->
//
// at the point in your HTML page where you want the posts to display.
//
//
// *NOTE 2: if you have thumbnails and want them to display, you must add:
//
// add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
// set_post_thumbnail_size( 175, 105, true ); // Normal post thumbnails
// add_image_size( 'single-post-thumbnail', 300, 9999 ); // Permalink thumbnail size
//
// to your THEME functions.php file, otherwise, remove the entire line (below)
// that starts with <?php if ( has_post_thumbnail().......
//
// You can adjust the thumbnail sizes in the set_post_thumbnail_size() function.
//
?>

<!-- set path to your wp-blog-header.php file -->
<?php require('/actual/path/to/wordpress/wp-blog-header.php'); ?>

<!-- set number of posts to display -->
<?php query_posts('showposts=8'); ?>

<!-- start the loop -->
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div style="margin: 4px 0px; border-style: dotted; border-color: #dddddd; border-width: 0px 0px 1px 0px;">
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a><br>
<?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { ?><div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 6px; float:right;"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_post_thumbnail() ?></a></div><?php } ?>
<?php $excerpt = strip_tags(get_the_excerpt()); echo $excerpt; ?><br>
<br>
</div>

<?php endwhile;?>
<!-- end the loop -->

<!-- EOF: wp-latest.php -->

...maybe more answer than wanted -- but it's how I do it.