Integrating into an existing web site

peginald · 2012-09-30 17:52:50

Hi,

First, I’m completely new to Textpattern, so apologies if this seems a bit mad.

THE SITUATION: I have an existing and successful commercial web site built with Python, CherryPy and MAKO templates. I’ve worked on it for a few years, it works well and I like the programming environment. Basically, I don’t want to change.

GOING FORWARD….

I’ve decided I need to get some blogging software – at the very least – and maybe some additional CMS bits and bobs – and doing my usual thing of reinventing the wheel is damaging my business. I don’t want to write my own half-baked blog software.

I like the simplicity of TP and Python CMS software is rather scarey – besides, i don’t think it will integrate much easier than TP, unless I migrated everything to the CMS software.

As it is a shopping environment, there are session items, such as a shopping basket, that are difficult to share between two web apps – no matter what technology they are – and I’m trying to work out how to glue them together.

I see two ways of doing this. First the database format of TP is so simple, I feel I can use TP for just content management, and then just pull the blog posts directly from the database in my existing application. I appreciate this is reinventing part of the wheel, but may be perfectly workable to blogs/articles etc. without user comments.

Alternatively for those parts of the site served by TP, I could provide a JSON interface to my existing server that would basically ask “Do I have anything in the shopping basket” or even just provide HTML code snippets for display.

Does anyone have an opinion on this. Has anyone done anything similar? Am I mad?

Thanks for your time.

Paul

whaleen · 2012-10-01 03:22:47

You can spit out JSON at your existing ‘server’ as long as it’s listening and fetching. Textpattern makes a great publishing platform. Jump in.

philwareham · 2012-10-01 08:39:35

Textpattern can be a good fit for what you want, I think. You can integrate as much or as little of the CMS into your existing setup relatively easily. You might also find rah_external_output plugin very useful for injecting Textpattern powered content into pages of third-party tools or existing setups.

whaleen · 2012-10-01 17:38:51

philwareham wrote:

You might also find rah_external_output plugin very useful for injecting Textpattern powered content into pages of third-party tools or existing setups.

Indeed.

peginald · 2012-10-03 15:21:20

Thanks for your help – rah_external_output looks ideal!

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Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2012-09-30 17:52:50

Integrating into an existing web site

#2 2012-10-01 03:22:47

Re: Integrating into an existing web site

#3 2012-10-01 08:39:35

Re: Integrating into an existing web site

#4 2012-10-01 17:38:51

Re: Integrating into an existing web site

#5 2012-10-03 15:21:20

Re: Integrating into an existing web site

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