If you look through the support forums for non-WordPress software such as forums, wiki’s, galleries etc., you will find countless requests for information about how to integrate a WordPress theme design into that other software. This is particularly common with forums, which are often attached to a corresponding WordPress powered site/blog. Our very own support forum is a good example of this.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to integrate the designs of one system into another. The best you can do usually, is to copy and paste the HTML output from the WordPress powered site, into the header/footer of the other system. However that doesn’t allow for menus, sidebars etc. to be dynamic.

The ultimate goal

The ultimate goal is for when you make a change to your WordPress theme, that those changes are automatically displayed in the other software. So if you decide you want to add a different widget into your WordPress site’s sidebar, it automatically appears in your forums sidebar and if you add a new menu item to your menu, it will also appear in the other software. WordPress’s little brother bbPress is able to do this in a crude fashion by loading the entirety of WordPress inside itself. This way you can use WordPress hooks, widgets etc. inside your bbPress theme. However by doing this, the load on your server is effectively doubled as it is having to load both WordPress and bbPress on every page load.

The solution

To get around the performance issues of loading two softwares at the same time, we have developed a WordPress plugin which caches the output of your WordPress theme and stores it in static files on your server. By including those files in the other software, you can totally restyle it via the WordPress theme and those changes are automatically updated every 60 mins (or however long you choose).

We use the PixoPoint Theme Integrator in our support forum.

What systems are supported?

Anything which can include a static HTML file into it’s theme can be used with this system. Since the plugin only outputs raw HTML as static files, the system is able to be used with a huge variety of forum, wiki and gallery softwares. Our support forum uses this system and is running on the SMF forum software.

Examples of software that this system should work with:

  • phpBB
  • bbPress
  • vBulletin
  • SMF
  • Wiki Media
  • Gallery 2
  • Coppermine Gallery
  • Drupal
  • Joomla
  • any many more …

Demo

You can see the PixoPoint Theme Integrator in action in our own support forum or you can check out the GreekBerry case study post.

Download

Download the PixoPoint Theme Integrator plugin

Installation

Please visit the PixoPoint Theme Integrator installation page for help with installing the plugin.

Support

We are happy to receive bug reports and code improvements in our forum. But we will not be providing free support for integrating your themes sorry. For assistance with using the plugin, please contact us for pricing information.