Add WP functionality to exisiting non-WP database

  • Hi everyone,

    I have looked around but don’t seem to be able to find any info on this question.

    I have an existing database-driven site (soundartarchive.net) and I want to add wp to it to allow user comments, forums, user posts etc.

    How do I go about incorporating wp to this?

    As far as I know, one possible fix is to manually create all the wp-tables as part of the old database. Which tables to I need to create? I also need to create each column? Do I need to create content for each field in each column? And then? This seems like a lot of effort, with the possbility of mistakes coming in. Is there a simpler way? Or is this the way forward?

    Many thanks,
    JMT

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  • This is not going to be a quick and easy project, as you’ve guessed. WordPress needs all of its tables, with all of their columns, and for anything to work you do need data in the tables. Comments are tied to posts so to get comments you have to have you data in a WP table ($wpdb->posts) as a post. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘forums’. WordPress doesn’t support any forums by default, though you can integrate forums.

    So, this is the easiest way I can think of: ??

    Install WordPress to the same database as you are already using. So long as you don’t have tables with the same names that WordPress uses there should be no problem, but backup everything first. Write yourself a script– a minimal plugin is easiest– that will read you old tables, parse them, and then insert them into WordPress tables. If you use a plugin as I suggested you can use WordPRess native function for the insertions and you will have to worry a lot less about populating the tables correctly. It isn’t easy, but it is doable. A few years back I basically did the same thing to convert an old and poorly designed site written in ASP and MSSql into a WordPress site, though I had the extra step of converting the MSSql into MySQL.

    This is assuming that your site is not something that WordPress can convert automatically. NOTE: The Chinese(?) at the top is weird. I think there has been a codex edit error. Scroll down and you can still see the things WordPress can import.

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