Integrating WordPress with Your Website (Is this possible with Multisite?)

It’s possible with Multisite, but you have to use a lot of switch_to_blog() calls, which makes your site run slower.

What kind of integration are you doing? Do you just need to pull in some posts or…?

Most of the integration is things like employee info and forms that are used on the WP side. Most are stand alone pages not running posts. I use RSS to fetch posts but they want some backend tools to work on their non WP sites.

One example is they have an extensive employee database with pictures, links, and other information. This is all managed on the WP side with several plugins by employees. It’s easy for us to use the built in tools to display the information on a WP page. They would like to have the page information displayed on one of their non WP pages, but still managed on the backend with WP. it’s kind of like a large about us or employees page with pictures, phone numbers, etc.

I tried to convince them to move all the services to within WP but they insist that for security reasons they will stay with the traditional web pages and only use the WP install to handle news, etc.

Sorry for the long explanation. How slow are we talking?

Really slow. At 100 sites it’d crash you :/

They’re trying to use WP as a DB, and not for what it is. Also including WP files like that is just as ‘risky’ as using WP itself.

I have suggested several options but they keep insisting that this is how they want to integrate WP into their site. I am new-er to their team and I think their old developer introduced them to WP and they treat it as a standalone database with plugins.

They are really only wanting to use the information generated from a plugin called connections to display on the employees page. So the data is not updating very option. I am not an expert at WP or loops. I have had some success integrating information from other pages but only on single WP installs.

The way they use WP is the setup an individual blog (call it) employees. I created a blank template that just serves up the data generated by the connections plugin. That blog only does that. I don’t know if that helps. I was assuming that If I could get the proper data I could use

<?php
  // Include WordPress
  define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
  require('/server/path/to/your/wordpress/site/htdocs/blog/wp-blog-header.php');
  query_posts('showposts=1');
?>

etc.

The problem is the line [query_posts('showposts=1');] I have never done this with pages or even know where to start with a WP-MS install.

It’ll be something like this:

<?php
  // Include WordPress
  define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
  require('/server/path/to/your/wordpress/site/htdocs/blog/wp-blog-header.php');
  switch_to_blog( 'BLOGID' );
  query_posts('showposts=1');
?>

*sigh* I hate when people just don’t understand how it works. (Them! Not you!)