WSN For WordPress!

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems to build websites around, and for good reason. Nonetheless, there comes a time in a website's life when WordPress alone is not enough and more specialized niche scripts are needed to supplement it. Rudimentary links or gallery plug-ins may not suffice for your purposes, or you want a proper discussion forum. It becomes necessary to install non-WordPress software, but to make it look and behave as a part of WordPress as seemlessly as possible with a minimum of work. This can be a difficult and time consuming process with most scripts, but is very simple when using the WSN suite of PHP scripts.

People not using WordPress install the WSN scripts via an autosetup.php tool — but for WordPress users, there's now a WordPress plugin for each script which does all setup and configuration for you!

Download the applicable plugin file for the script you want. In your WordPress admin panel, go to Plugins -> Add New and click the "Upload Plugin" button in the upper left of the page. Upload the zip there, then go to the Installed Plugins page to activate it. If you're unable to upload the zip file through WordPress because your web host doesn't allow large file uploads, you can do it via FTP instead. First, extract the zip on your computer to get the .php file from it -- then upload that to /wp-content/plugins/ under where you installed WordPress. Then go to Plugins -> Installed Plugins to activate.

Upon activation, WSN will automatically install itself in a subdirectory and automatically integrate logins and theme with your WordPress. If you deactivate the plugin later, it'll put the WSN installation into maintenance mode. If you uninstall the plugin, it'll completely remove the WSN installation for you.

For basic use, that's all there is to it! But let's talk about ways you can share content between WSN and WordPress. You might want to show recent WordPress articles inside WSN Links or show the most recent WSN Forum threads on your WordPress homepage, for example. To call content from WordPress into WSN, just insert this code into the desired WSN template at Admin Panel -> Themes -> Manage Templates:
<!-- BEGIN http://example.com/?feed=rss RSS --> <p>WordPress updates:</p> <!-- BEGIN ROW --> From {RSSDATE}:<br /> <a href="{RSSLINK}">{RSSTITLE}</a> - {RSSDESCRIPTION}<br /> <!-- END ROW --> <!-- END http://example.com/?feed=rss RSS -->
Change http://example.com/?feed=rss in the above to the URL of your WordPress RSS feed.

To display content from a WSN script plugin inside your WordPress you can use a WordPress shortcode. Use [wsnlinkstoplist]toplist content here[/wsnlinkstoplist]. Replace wsnlinks with the applicable script name -- wsnlinks, wsngallery, wsnkb, wsnforum, wsnclassifieds, wsnsd or wsndirectory. Generate the toplist content at WSN's Admin -> Themes -> Toplist Generator -- it can be pretty much any contnet you can imagine. For example:

There are a few limitations:
1) You can't do paginated toplists.
2) You can't do live (ajax) toplists.
3) Shortcodes don't work on the front page experpts unless you modify your wordpress theme as described here.

If you prefer you could also use WSN's JavaScript export utility (Admin Panel -> Miscellaneous -> JavaScript Export) or install a WordPress RSS reader plug-in so that you can call data from WSN's customizable RSS feeds. WSN's feeds can produce any content you want, and are accessed via the rssfeed.php file in your WSN installation directory.

You may also need to change some of the colors in the WSN stylesheet at Admin -> Themes -> Manage Templates -> Stylesheet. The cascading order of styles is WSN's base style first, then wordpress styles, then WSN's smaller editable style. This means wordpress gets to override the bulk of WSN's background styling where it needs to but WSN's editable style still lets you set colors and fonts to override wordpress.

At this point, your WSN should fit in seamlessly with your WordPress. As you've seen in this tutorial, integrating a powerful script into an existing wordpress website doesn't have to be as difficult as it might first appear.

Relevant Links:

• WordPress - Content Management System
• WSN Forum - Discussion forum
• WSN Gallery - Media gallery for images, videos and youtube
• WSN Knowledge Base - Article directory
• WSN Links - Links directory
• WSN Classifieds - Classified ads
• WSN Software Directory - Software repository
• WSN Directory - Business directory