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Integration Guide

Home  |  How to Integrate Joomla into WebPlus

Now you can add a professional, Self Hosted CMS to your WebPlus site

By integrating the latest version of Joomla into your WebPlus site, you can have the best of both worlds. An easy to use web design application, plus all the power of Joomla CMS. The good news is that it’s far easier to do than you may first think.

 

This site not only explains how to do it, but also demonstrates how an integrated site looks. This page is a standard WebPlus created page. It’s a simple design to make it easy for you to get the information you need. It uses a simple text menu and contains minimal graphics. However, when you switch to the “How to Integrate Joomla Page”, you will see the site header and text menu remains the same, but the content on the page is being fed into WebPlus from a Joomla installation hosted on the same server.

 

The Joomla pages have their own links and menus that don’t interfere with your WebPlus site. Furthermore, if you are creating a site for a client to maintain, you can safely hand over control of the Joomla administration area without having to worry about the client upsetting your carefully crafted WebPlus creation.

 

For professional, business sites that may require ecommerce features and secure areas, it makes sense to use a self-hosted CMS solution. It’s also worth getting the world’s most used CMS solution, as it is well supported by extension developers the world over. Whilst the Serif smart objects are great for small business, personal and hobby sites, they were not really designed for business-critical commercial sites. So, if you love the simplicity and ease of development that WebPlus offers, but you need to provide sophisticated bolt-on solutions, this is the place to start.

 

With the release of Joomla 1.7, the task of setting up a Joomla installation has become considerably less problematic. It even includes a one-click updater so you no longer have to keep downloading and installing update zip packages to your server.

 

Although this guide suggests setting up your WebPlus site to display Joomla content in an iframe, there are situations, such as turnkey web applications that run in Joomla, where it may only be necessary to open the Joomla application in a new window (in much the same way as Serif’s forums open in a new window from their main website). This is achieved by simply adding an external link to your main webplus site navigation. The options are all there - once you get to know Joomla as an integration tool, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Why DO It?

For the same reasons you would use a variety of WebPlus Smart Objects - to give you and your clients extra functionality in your website.

 

The problem with the smart objects route is that they comprise of scripted solutions that are hosted on Serif’s servers. This may not be something you or your clients are happy with. If the Serif SWR server should go down (which it does occasionally), all your smart objects stop working even though your site is available to the world. And, when it comes to blogs and forums, you lose all the seo advantages of having your constantly changing content on your own domain.

 

By integrating Joomla, you not only have a world leading CMS built into your site, but you also have access to thousands of web applications and Joomla extensions that can all be hosted within your own domain.

 

Integrating the two applications also gives you a lot of developer advantages. You can create all your static pages in the WebPlus WISYWIG design environment, and simply include linked iframes in which to display Joomla content or web applications that will change more frequently.

 

So, no matter what your clients ask you for, whether it be a social networking application, a shopping cart, a classified ad site, a real estate listing service or a simple membership-only site, you can do it right within a webplus created site.

 

And when the site is completed, you can give your client access to to Joomla’s administration area, safe in the knowledge that your WebPlus pages cannot be broken.