This week has seen the staged migration of topteks across to the wordpress platform.

Top-teks.co.uk were one of Amersham Websites first customers and where the first to have a bespoke admin system built for them. This was built from scratch and was a really cool admin system built specificaly for their business requirements.

With the ever improving power of the wordpress platform it was a simple decision for them to request to be migrated across, however this was not an easy task for us to implement as the existing catalog and orders data was to remain on the old platform until stage 2 of the migration.

So the first stage was to create an admin system to be able to create stand alone pages and have these pages look and feel part of the main current site, this was pretty technically straight forward however the issue came when trying to link it all together. When on the wordpress pages it was easy to link out as everything is all administrable but trying to link from the old platform to the new platform was an issue unless we hardcoded the links, but even then we would have the problem that the links would change structure so this would not be very reliable.

What we managed to find out was we could include all the functions and power of wordpress within the non wordpress structure by adding an include to point at the new platform, simple as that, now all the regular wp functions are available so we could change the old links to now be dynamically created through either a wp menu item or a wp links. If any one else is trying to do a similar thing then read my article about wordpress functions on a non wordpress platform.

Top-teks new wordpress pages