Magento and WordPress are each dominant in their respective domains. Magento is the world’s most popular open source eCommerce platform, and WordPress the leading content management system. Each has its own strengths, but there are areas where those strengths don’t overlap. WordPress can be modified to function as an online store, and Magento can be used to some degree for content management, but neither is the ideal solution for the other platform’s areas of competence. There’s often a clear need for a business to use both products, and when that’s the case it can be very useful to have some degree of integration, especially when it comes to including aspects of a Magento store within a WordPress site. To that end, we’re going to have a look at a couple of alternatives that make integration simpler.
Magento WordPress Integration from James Kemp
One of the more popular solutions for integrating the two platforms comes from developer James Kemp. He has a suite of WordPress extensions that make including Magento content in a WordPress site fairly effortless. With the Magento WordPress Integration Plugin users can bring any default Magento blocks into their WordPress theme, as well as custom blocks. One of the most useful functions of this plugin comes as a paid addon that enables WordPress users to show Magento products on any WordPress post or page by using shortcodes. There’s also a widget addon that enables product categories to be shown on WordPress pages. Users of this plugin might also want to take a look at a Magento extension from the same developer for Single Sign-on for Magento and WordPress installations.
One drawback with this plugin (which seems to be common to most integration extensions) is that Magento and WordPress need to be installed on the same server, although it will work if they are served from different subdomains.
WordPress Integration from FishPig
If you’re interested in bringing a WordPress blog into your Magento store, rather than exporting Magento features to a WordPress blog, take a look at this Magento extension by the endearingly named FishPig. Integrating a blog into a Magento store can have significant SEO benefits. Among the features this plugin offers are the ability to use your Magento theme for the WordPress blog, 1-Click login to the WordPress admin panel from Magento, and the ability to quickly associate WordPress posts with Magento products. As with the first extension we looked at, there are a couple of paid addition that bring extra features, like WordPress Multisite Integration and Magento WordPress customer synchronization.
Have you had any experiences with Magento and WordPress integration you’d like to share. Have you tried these extensions or others? Let us know in the comments.
