X-Cart forums

[D Brugge]

I would like my wordpress Blog to be seamless and to appear as an integral part of my X-Cart site.

I don't want visitors of my blog (coming from X-Cart) to have to sign in a separate time to participate in the blog. It would also be nice if I could pass the users who have signed in at my blog back to X-Cart.

While I making wishes, it would be nice if they could register at either the x-cart section OR the blog section and have the information synchronized. For that matter, perhaps even pull from and update a single user database.

Any ideas?

[SystemSkins]

I don't think that's possible, but I could be wrong. Most x-cart sites that I've seen with blogs have 2 separate log ins.

As far as a 3rd party mod doing this I personally have not seen one like what you are asking for.

Most people who add blogs to their x-cart site host it at www.yourdomain.com/blog and edit the blog's CSS to match the x-cart site.

If you do find a mod like what you are asking for please be sure to post your find as I would like to check it out.

[D Brugge]

Agreed that that is the usual way to go, but it's not ideal. An ideal solution would be for X-Cart to allow the full incorporation of WordPress into its framework.

But since both X-Cart and WordPress rely on cookies to keep track of who is logged in, there seems there could be a solution, as long as the user name, etc match. It seems that you can turn off registration in wordpress and perhaps write a script that uses the new user email feature from x-Cart to register a matching user for Wordpress. Then, when a user signs in to x-cart, generate a Wordpress session cookie as well.

As far as being able to register at one and have it passed to another, that's a much bigger hurdle that involves security problems. I'm only wishing out loud on that one.

[Alison]

I'm not an expert at this, but I bet there is a way to integrate the databases. I have a really popular blog that I've run for years. It's run on WordPress, but I removed the comment section and hacked in a Vanilla forum instead. So the blog comments, along with other forum threads, all show up in the vanilla forum instead of on a particular blog entry. (The blog entry links to it's discussion.)

There is one database, so the members can log in either on the WordPress side or the Vanilla side and they stay logged in.

Like I said, I don't know enough about X-cart to address this, but I think it's possible.

[D Brugge]

Well, I maintain one site that has four blogs that share a single database. That is not particularly difficult with wordpress, but the database structure was set up by the initial wordpress install in the first place.

I am not a coder, I am a designer. I know just enough about coding to keep getting myself in over my head. I haven't even taken the time to see what the file structure of the x-cart and the Wordpress user database is nor have I even examined the session cookies.

I only threw this out to see if someone had already been down this road before and know some things that I didn't.

[shorelineoftahoe]

I can add a few tips if anyone is trying to do something like this on their own. I only wanted the ability to show the minicart on the blog. I didn't deal with users, just $MINICART and $login (so they could log out if they wanted from the blog)

First off, you have to make sure both the xcart and wordpress database tables are located inside the same database.

Second, I added the following lines to the wordpress folder's index.php file.

require_once("../auth.php");
include $xcart_dir."/minicart.php";

Right before:
/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require('./wp-blog-header.php');

(I'm not sure if this is the best place to add this information, so if anyone who knows wordpress better wants to reply I'd be interested to know.)

Now both the $MINICART and $login variables, plus a host of other xcart variables including $smarty, are available to wordpress and your templates. So you call something like func_display("customer/head.tpl", $smarty); to get a specific xcart .tpl template file in your wordpress templates. (I hate copying code.)

This isn't exactly on topic, but I thought it might help someone else out.

[D Brugge]

Originally Posted by shorelineoftahoe

This isn't exactly on topic, but I thought it might help someone else out.

No, in a round about way, it IS on topic. The topic being how to make WordPress seamless within X-Cart.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Dmitri]

Hello

I would suggest to keep away from tide integration of x-cart with word press, mainly, for performance reasons.
You would essentially be loading up both applications every time you access WordPress, and while WordPress is very fast and light, X-Cart can be very server resource hungry.
Server load means slower site, which is not good.

But that of course leaves you without cart content/status in WordPress.

The easiest way is to have wordpress theme matching the x-cart theme while running WordPress blog completely independent from your X-Cart.

here are couple of examples of that approach:
WordPress: http://www.carttemplates.com/
X-Cart: http://www.carttemplates.com/mods/

WordPress: http://www.outdoorphotogear.com/blog/
X-Cart: http://www.outdoorphotogear.com/store/

And if you want to have recent blog posts on your X-Cart pages you can use this free mod here http://www.carttemplates.com/mods/xcart-wordpress-rss-feed-integration.html

Hope that helps!

[D Brugge]

Hi Dmitri,

Yes, as I dig into X-Cart more, I realize what a sever hungry b***h that it is.

I wasn't concerned so much with matching the themes, as I didn't want visitors to have to log in to two separate entities, perhaps at times having to use two seperate user ids and passwords.

But, for reasons that you pointed out, I've abandoned hope of that becoming a reality. I'll wait until X-Cart 5 (If I should live so long) and see what its structure looks like.

[voodoo1967]

I plan on setting up a blog / news page.
The only thing I need to decide is whether to have written in a static page or have a link from that static page to the blog or whether to instead to add a link into the 'speed bar'