The site transferring from one platform to another always raises a lot of questions and problems, especially if it is connected with an online store.
Let us review how to perform integration of Magento ® and WordPress with step by step instructions.
The concepts of Magento WordPress Integration
One of the most popular content management platforms is WordPress. It is well-known because of its open source and flexibility. Mainly, it is used as a platform to maintain personal blogs and websites in the Internet, but thanks to the flexibility you can do almost anything on this CMS: an online store, cinema and so on.
Magento ® is an open source management system for online stores and it is more complicated than WordPress. It is more difficult to maintain Magento ®, but it has a lot of different functions.
Professional online stores are created on Magento ®. It was proved many times by the specialists from different successful companies that the blog in the web store is necessary. It increases the trust and the targeted audience to you. Let us review how to integrate Magento ® and WordPress.
Step by step instructions
1. Firstly, you should install the newest version of the WordPress official site http://wordpress.org. After the loading is finished, you need to unzip the package with WordPress in the root Magento ® catalog where the project is located and rename it on the blog. Then you need to go to the blog with your browser. Please open the following page with the address to do it:
http://magento.local.com/blog
2. Let us direct our browser to the blog. In our case it is http://magento.local.com/blog After this we should launch the installation process. The process is very easy and all the steps can be understood intuitively. So, it should not raise any difficulties.
3. Now you should create a theme (meanwhile check our themes for Magento ®) for new WordPress blog in the online store on Magento ®. In order to get the base of your WordPress design, you can take the Twenty Ten theme files by copying the files from the theme. This catalog is located in /blog/wp-content/ Then you should rename the folder as Magento ®.
4. Now you need to remove all the files from a new Magento ® folder on the path blog/wp-content/themes, except the files with the php expansion.
5. Then you need to copy CSS and all the images of the active theme for Magento ® used by your store and insert them in blog/wp-content/themes/magento.
6. Now you need to change the code in the file called style.css which you will find in the catalog blog/wp-content/themes/magento. You should see something like this code:
/*
Theme Name: Magento
Theme URI: http://domain.com/
Description: The Magento theme for wordpress created with magento
default theme based on Twenty Ten
Author: Your Name
Version: 1.0
Tags: black, blue, white, two-columns, fixed-width, custom-header,
theme-options, threaded-comments, sticky-post, translation-ready,
microformats, rtl-language-support
*/
@import 'css/styles.css';
7. In order to bring the style of our blog to the style of the entire Magento ® store, you can change the header and footer files. At first, we should edit the top header a bit. To do it you should go to catalog: blog/wp-content/themes and find the file header.php. Then you should modify it according to the store parameters, in other words, to change the color and so on. You can find the footer.php file in this folder and change the necessary values too.
8. After installing the blog on your Magento ® site you can add the store menu to it because it can attract your customers’ attention. You can do it on the WordPress admin menu.
So, you have just finished the WordPress installation based on Magento ®, changed the theme and added some personality to it. But there are many methods available for how to do the blog on Magento ®. If you can’t integrate WordPress and Magento ®, you can contact GoMage company and our specialists will do it for you.
