Integrate a Rails application into a site made in wordpress

Question

I am currently building an application (An Analyzer tool) in Rails 3.2. I am just about done with it in the development phase. I am having our designer begin work on designing our new website where this application will be integrated.

I had an idea though and wanted to get a feedback badly.

What if the website is built on WordPress, but that that analyzer tool (Which is built in rails) , which has its own backend/reporting system and that element of the site accounted for the custom coding? So it was a hybrid of Wordpress and this analyzer tool? Is this possible? And if it's possible do you foresee any challenges with that?

Any help would be very appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You might want to check out this plugin for wordpress:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rails-integration-api/

It basically copies any 3rd party app (such as Wordpress) to a subdirectory of your Rails app.

The real challenges are in the details.... authentication, authorization between admins in the WP site and the Rails app, etc. A question you should ask yourself is how much are the website(wp) and Rails app going to need to talk to each other, if at all?

However, if the WP site is just used mostly as an informational site or maybe a blog, you can place your WP site inside the /public directory of your rails app, tweak the config files (if you're running Apache/Passenger etc), and go from there.