[SOLVED] integrating iWeb and WordPress

I had noticed that my  old web­site www.sondette.com based on only iWeb had become slightly pop­u­lar, and I felt it looked bor­ing, so it was time for an update using Word­Press. It seemed like a nice idea to com­bine the best from two worlds using a Word­Press blog together with pages from iWeb, espe­cially because of its good look­ing slide shows that I wanted to use in a pri­vate area, and for the con­ve­nience of WYSIWYG. I searched the web and found just what I wanted in a doc­u­ment called iWeb­FAQ so I bought the PDF.

After read­ing it, I decided to do it with­out iFrames. I decided to fol­low most of the advices, but all re-direc­tions of links would be done using the htac­cess-file. It may be more dif­fi­cult to use than what was sug­gested in iWeb­FAQ, to redi­rect on indi­vid­ual pages using “alter­na­tive HTML”, but I thought htac­cess would be more pow­er­ful. Espe­cially because I had some old pages that I wanted to redi­rect AND delete. In addi­tion, it would be good to learn some sim­ple htac­cess-tricks for extremely sim­ple, yet pow­er­ful pass­word pro­tec­tion. I strug­gled a lot with iWe­b’s HTML-snip­pets and tried to use it to insert HTML-code for video stream­ing. It turned out that this was not reli­able, iWeb was doing “some­thing more” with the code than just insert­ing it. One more thing I did­n’t like with it was that the win­dow size of the HTML-snip­pet changed as soon as I pushed the apply-but­ton. Using the idea of alter­na­tive HTML solved this. It is cer­tainly a good idea to fol­low the rec­om­men­da­tions in iWebFAQ.

The most dif­fi­cult point was to “har­mo­nize” the looks of the iWeb pages and the Word­Press pages. In par­tic­u­lar, it was really not easy to mod­ify the themes in Word­Press. Most of it was done by mod­i­fy­ing a style sheet file, a CSS-file, but some­times, the php-code needed some (minor) mod­i­fi­ca­tions. After many of days work, I felt they were sim­i­lar enough.

Now the fun part could begin. I copied the text from my old pages to their new place, pimped them up a lit­tle, and added some new videos. Finally I added Ana­lyt­ics and Feed­Burner from Google to get feed­back and flex­i­bil­ity for myself and the few who will fol­low what I will write. I think this will be good enough for me for a cou­ple of years!