It has been a bumpy ride
We wrote that we were toying with Magento-WordPress integration in this post and all went well on our local server. Well, it has been a bumpy ride soon as we moved the integration to our live server.
The integration works at our local server that runs on Apache 2.0. It was almost a out-of-the-box smooth setup. We got everything working as expected and here you can see a screenshot from one of the tests.
Scenery not so rosy!
Soon as we moved the integration to the live server, the first thing we encountered was a blank page. We soon realized the htaccess rewrite rule that works on our local server does not work in CGI/FastCGI server. After weeks of bug hunting, we were still going nowhere. Then we found an Angel whose name is Angel from The Creative Bin, who has done the same integration on a site and has helped us solved the issue. According to Angel, that there maybe an issue with the way PHP 5 works on our server. What he did is run the WordPress under PHP4, turned on output buffering and turned off zlib.output compression.
Problem solved, but…
This works! We can run WordPress’ plugins no problem and is able to pull the jQuery codes (one that we use is the Comment Box at the bottom of each article) directly from Magento. Except that on our server, the Blog URL page (that we intend to use as blog landing page) pulls twice the header and footer from Magento’s side.
Apart from this, we also find two issues that likely will be deal breaker for some people.
- If you install canonical URL’s extension, all your wordpress’ articles will look like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://your-magento-site.com/cms-index-defaultnoroute"/>
- Page title: Magento shows a default page title “customer login” for all wordpress’ articles. We changed it to “Lotus Seeds Design: Magento theme design, WordPress, accessible web design service” using “setTitle” in cms.xml file.
We think both issues are fixable by pulling WordPress’s head section to Magento, but we have yet to investigate it further. Also, In our case, we feel that it’s perfectly OK to forgo the above tags because here at Lotus Seeds Design we practise Semantic markup and Semantic SEO, therefor we do not think not using canonical URL and using the same title text for all WordPress’ articles could harm our site’s SEO.
We are
Hi,
Thanks for sharing your experiences with wordpress/magento integration. I’m going to be doing the same myself shortly.
With regards to your SEO, semantic markup doesn’t help that much for SEO. Having duplicate title tags is much worse than having terrible markup. The canonical tag doesn’t matter too much though.
It won’t hurt your whole site, but it will hurt the pages that have the same titles.
You can check out google webmaster tools and you will see that Google will recommend you to remove the duplicate title tags.
Cheers,
Luke