Import WordPress Posts into a Pre-Existing PHP Site Layout!

On my portfolio-site I wanted to have word-press maintain the short “news and updates” posts on my front page. The goal is to have WordPress do the heavy-lifting and THEN transparently pull the posts into the external web-site with a little php-magic!

The starting point to accomplish this is here:
https://www.transycan.net/blogtest/2005/07/05/integrate/2/

This may only take you half-way though. I dynamically build my entire page FIRST storing all output into a php-variable as a string. Only when the page is complete do I print the whole thing in one shot.

The Major Problem:
——————-
Most of WordPress’s ‘Template-Tag’ functions “echo” their output rather than sensibly returning a value. I suppose somebody skipped the class on ‘Get_member() and Set_member() functions…

Regardless, for some ‘Template-Tag’ functions the final parameter is a boolean value to toggle ‘display’. Use FALSE to GET the value and store it.

Other functions employ other tricks. For ‘the_tag()’ you may be simply be able to use ‘get_tag()’ or ‘get_the_tag()’ in some cases. In others more work is needed.

Searching the WordPress web-site docs, and forums reviles the solution to all of these but you will have to work for it.

The End
———
This took much longer than I wanted to spend on it, so not- much explanation but here’s some PHP to help the next guy in-line.

This will be in action on https://www.stevengpeterson.com probably later this week. Right now all updates are on the private-dev-site.

/* WordPress Integration
********************************************/
   $display .= "<div>";

if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();

$wp_date = the_date('','<h3>','</h3>', false);
$wp_postID = get_the_ID();
$wp_permalink = get_permalink();
$wp_title = the_title('','',false);

$wp_author = get_the_author();
$wp_time = get_the_time();
$wp_content = apply_filters('the_content', get_the_content());

$wp_category = "";
foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
    $wp_category .= $category->cat_name . ', ';
    }

   $display .= "$wp_date
      <div class=\"post\" id=\"post- $wp_postID\">
         <h3 class=\"storytitle\"><a href=\"$wp_permalink\"
            rel=\"bookmark\">$wp_title</a></h3>

         <div class=\"meta\">$_eFiled $wp_category —
            $wp_author @ $wp_time
            </div>

         <div class=\"storycontent\">
            $wp_content
            </div>

         <div class=\"feedback\">
            </div>
      </div>

endwhile; else:
$wp_apology = _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.');

   $display .= "<p>$wp_apology</p>";
endif;

   $display .= "
      </div>";