Background

RapidPress was/is an attempt to create a theme for WordPress that will allow it to perfectly mimic your RapidWeaver theme. It does not work automatically, but it is relatively easy to setup. I will post the instructions from my old website shortly. In the mean time it is still available for download (0.11 or 0.12) and is licensed under a CC SA-A-NC license.

Why WordPress + RapidWeaver?

RapidWeaver really kicks @ss. The only problem is their blog plugin lacks several important features:

• There are no permalinks.
• There is no way to view individual posts.
• There is no way to search.
• There is no ping service support.
• There is no way to import WordPress posts into RapidWeaver.
• There is no (easy) way to export RapidWeaver posts, i.e. you are (sort of) locked in.

Note: All this is supposed to be fixed in RapidWeaver 3.5, which is due out soon.

I searched around on RapidWeaver’s Forum to see if there were any solutions to these problems and for the most part there are not. So then I started looking for a way to integrate WordPress and RapidWeaver. Nobody had done so yet, so I decided to take on the task.

At first I tried to just do a styled page and include the WordPress body using PHP. That worked fine for a very limited case but to really get the full functionality of WordPress I would have to make a theme for WordPress that matched RapidWeaver.

What I have been able to do is to make a theme that requires only modest changes to integrate with RapidWeaver.

Instructions

There are just two files you have to update to get it setup at first, and then only one section of one file you have to update when you change the sidebar layout or theme in RapidWeaver.

You will have to install WordPress on your server. Create a Offsite Page page in RapidWeaver and link it to the directory you installed WordPress in, i.e. http://yourdomain.com/blog/.

Download (0.11 or 0.12) my RapidPress theme and then make the following changes to footer.php and header.php.

Open the source code of one of your RapidWeaver pages from your web browser. Then you will cut and paste parts of this page into the following two files:

footer.php

Edit footer.php to fit your footer from your RW page:

<div>
    CC A-NC-SA 2.5 License -
        <a href="http://domain.com/wordpress/feed/">Blog Feed</a>
</div>

You should only have to modify the shown part of the footer.php to match your sites footer or remove the footer entirely as shown below.

<div>...</div>

header.php

Copy from the very first line down to and including (this extends all the way down into the body, for me it is 87 lines but this obviously depends on how many pages you have in your menu, the theme, etc.):

<div>
    ...
<br />

and paste this into header.php.

Change the page title to whatever you want (in the head):

<title>Blog</title>

Add your blog to the navigation container (the very beginning of the body):

<li><a href="http://domain.com/wordpress/" rel="self" id="current" name="current">Blog</a></li>

and remove:

id="current"
name="current"

from whichever page had it.

Now for each of the links in sidebar besides the link to your blog add a preceding forward slash / to each link so that it is an absolute link and will work since WP is not necessarily on the same level as RW’s files.:

<li><a href="/index.html" rel="self">Home</a></li>

Then you just upload the RapidPress theme folder into the themes directory of your WordPress install, i.e. yourwordpressdir/wp-content/themes/. Then in WordPress Admin select the RapidPress theme.

Let me know if it works or not, I can’t promise I’ll be able to help because I may not know how or I might be to busy, but I’ll try.