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.

I fixed RapidPress a bit by moving all the editing parts into the header and footer. This should help some of you get the headers and footers of your webpage looking better. The theme I used when I created the old one had a different order of divs and led to some themes leaving an extra div unclosed.

Download it from my downloads page.

Note: If you downloaded it before seeing this, then you should redownload it. I forgot to update all the files to fix the header/footer issue.

Also, note that I tried to update the instructions. I don’t know how good they are, it all seems like second nature to me now, but let me know if you have trouble as long as you have given it some time of your own before you ask for mine.

I have also added a category (and a sidebar) so RapidPress can be found easier.

EDIT (2009-03-26) This article has been getting quite a few hits recently and I just wanted to comment. It is VERY old, this technique was a sloppy hack to begin with. Feel free to try to duplicate but I don’t have RapidWeaver anymore so I can’t really fix it. The WordPress theme files can be grabbed from my /dump/. This article has barely survived the transition from different platforms so most of the reference to code are garbled.

I mentioned previously that I just found an awesome web design program for those (like me) who are not interested in learning too much about web design but still want a nice looking website.

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.

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.

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/.

Get Started

Download 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:

>

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.

>

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> > … >

and paste this into header.php.

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

>

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

>

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.:

>

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.