Boredworkers.com

So you have your main site up and added a Wordpress (WP) blog for making announcements and updates (or you’re planning to do so). What next? Have you ever considered the fact that you’re maintaining two seperate databases and access controls? Why not merge your main site and WP?

There are arguments against this of course. As with everything else in the world, there’s always a pro and con to doing something in a particular way. The biggest argument that I’ve heard is that by merging the two, you wind up with a messed up database and possibly broken site. Well, to refute that argument, you can actually let your site ride the WP database and access control without much difficulty and still keep your site fairly independant of WP (with its own database management and such). Furthermore, why create your own access control (read: user verification and control panel security) when the one that comes with WP is adequate for the job (and probably more secure).

And it isn’t even all that difficult to do. If you’ve designed your website, you’ve probably already written some database generation, backup and restore scripts. Additionally, you may have created some admin pages with some form of access control. That’s great. All you need to do is to create a WP plugin wrapper around those existing interfaces and drop the admin pages into WP’s control panel. Doing so is simple enough and the best resource to get started on WP plugins is to read the WP documentation. Once the wrappers have been created and the plugins activated, your admin pages will be hidden safely inside WP’s control panel.

To allow your site’s public pages to access the wordpress database, you simply need to include the ‘wp-config.php’ file that is located within your WP main directory. That will define all the WP functions, and database access class (WP uses ezSQL). To gain access to WP’s database, you need only include the line ‘global $wpdb;‘ prior to using the ezSQL access functions to perform the necessary SQL.

So, to conclude, once again, why not ride WP’s database and access control functions? It will save you a whole lot of grief coding up your own (unless you’re masochistic or you’re trying to learn the trade) and provide you with a good stable platform to run your site from. Leave your arguments and make them intelligent.