Let's all get along

WordPress and Concrete5 were designed for different tasks originally, and it shows. Concrete was designed to make websites great. WordPress was designed for blogging.

Why not leverage the strengths of each platform, together?

Features and flexibility

Using WordPress and Concrete5 together means that you can take advantage of a great number of blogging features, while maintaining the creative control and flexibility built into Concrete5.

I have plugins installed that send a tweet on Twitter and a status update on Facebook whenever I write a new post, or that add syntax highlighting to code that I write when blogging about programming, but using the C5 block structure, I can easily move, edit or change my site on the fly.

You can display your full blog entries from WordPress (with support for the "More" tag), or you can just show excerpts. To write or edit a post, links are integrated into Concrete or you can use remote publishing options like Windows Live Writer, email or mobile apps designed for WordPress.

Easy-to-use template system (NEW)

The WordPress for Concrete5 add-on sports a nifty, easy-to-use template system for customizing your blog. Change your markup at will without breaking compatibility for future updates.

Nuts and bolts

First you install a WordPress blog on your site (if you don't have one already) and install an API plugin to give Concrete access to your posts. Then you use the WordPress for Concrete5 add-on to display blog entries and navigation by search, category, date or tag.

Your entries will be styled according to your theme in Concrete5 -- a WordPress theme is not required. Entries are downloaded using AJAX, so no additional load is placed on your web server. If your page is visited by a search engine, cURL will be used instead.

Comments

The WordPress for Concrete5 add-on uses Disqus to handle comments. This means greater security for you, and also much more features. Visitors can sign into your blog using Facebook, Twitter, OpenID and many other login mechanisms, and comments are more easily tracked.

Check it out!

The add-on is easy and fun! Feel free to use the documentation for helpful tips on settings things up or customizing your WordPress install, or let me know if you have a suggestion, question, or are interested in more features. You can check out the screenshots above, or see a live example at http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog.

Thanks, and let me know if you ever need help!