Everything In Between

I wanted to use my blog entries, created in WordPress to generate content for pages on my site that were not in my blog. This seemed simple enough, and it is, but without some guidance this can be a really confusing situation. While WordPress supports a pseudo-templating system that can be used to easily customize the look and feel of a WordPress blog, getting that blog-portion of the site to play nice with the other parts of a site (or the converse, as the case may be) is often not as easy as it seems.

I believe this is one of the reasons why WordPress’s popularity has not yet reached its enormous potential.

But without further ado, here’s what I did to get WordPress to generate pages in a directory completely outside WordPress’s own installation directory.

The Solution

The solution involves replacing all occurences of WordPress’s erroneous absolute link-creation output and replace it with output appropriate to the /newsection structure. This was done with PHP’s output buffering. Then, to make it work with the permalink structure, I made some edits to the WordPress-generated RewriteRules. In the hopes that this will be of use to someone, here’s what I did:

1. In the top of your new section’s template (/newsection/index.php), following the line with the require() statement, put a new line that reads:

   ob_start();

   This will start the output buffer.

2. At the very bottom of your template, after the </html> add the following lines:

   <?php
   $page_content = ob_get_contents();
   $replace_this = 'href="http://mysite.com/blog';
   $with_this = 'href="http://mysite.com/newsection';
   $modified_page_content = str_replace($replace_this, $with_this, $page_content);
   ob_end_clean();
   echo $modified_page_content;
   ?>

   These do the replacements you need. Obviously, change the mysite.com to whatever your site domain is, change the /blog to whatever path your WordPress install is at, and change the /newsection to the path of the new section you’re creating.

   With these lines wrapped around your template, you can use all of WordPress’s original template tags like the_permalink() and wp_list_cats() just as you would if you were using them in the original section.

   Note to regex wizards: this is obviously a very crude string replacement, and I don’t know how well it will work in situations not like my own. I’m not very good with regular expressions, however, so if you can think of one that would work better with preg_replace() please let me know.

3. If you’re using WordPress’s virtual site structure (pretty-permalinks): Copy the rules WordPress wrote for you at Options->Permalinks (or from your existing .htaccess file) and paste them into a new text document. This will become your new section’s .htaccess file.

   1. In the line that begins with RewriteBase replace the old base with the new base path to your section. If the line read RewriteBase /blog/ then you would replace /blog/ with /newsection/.

   2. Finally, for the second, third, and fourth lines that begins with RewriteRule replace the old actual path with the actual path to your new section. So, continuing the example above, if you have a line that reads like this,

      RewriteRule ^category/?(.*) /blog/index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]

      replace it with this:

      RewriteRule ^category/?(.*) /newsection/index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]

   3. Save this file as a new .htaccess file and upload it to your server so that it resides at http://mysite.com/newsection/.htaccess

No matter what section/directory of your site you’re putting WordPress templates in, you can use this method to point links to the current section, and thus load WordPress content in the templates within that section/directory. One important caveat to this method is that every time a template using this method is accessed, your server works a little over-time to do the str_replace() on your content. This won’t be noticeable on small or short pages, but could really become an issue on oft-visited, long, long pages. As always, use at your own risk.

Improvements/warnings/suggestions/hate mail are welcome.

External Resources

• The original support forum thread.
• The Wiki HowTo node I wrote.
• WordPress Customization Notes.