How do I render a blog feed inside of another page?

Question

I'm doing a fairly small project for a friend/client who wants a website with some information on it, a couple of simple pages, and a blog. I want the blog to be integrated into the site really well, and not have to build the site around Wordpress or other software (and I don't want to have a page with two links for "Enter Site" or "Enter Blog")... what's my best option?

I've been thinking I could use XSLT to translate the rss feed into HTML and display it within the page, but that would leave out any commenting functionality.

Thoughts? Is there a good solution out there without having to do a lot of work to make wordpress fit in to the site?

Answer 1

XSLT is a lot of work for very little gain, in my experience. It's fantastic if you absolutely MUST use XML, and must provide the transform with the data, but it's otherwise slower and less useful than parsing the XML in a more general language.

Your idea isn't outrageously bad though, particularly if you implement some third-party commenting system. You've only got to parse the title, post content, dates, and so on. If you wanted to keep the existing commenting system, you might simply replicate the existing comment box and direct it to the backend wordpress install.

An alternative if you really don't want to deal with all the cruft associated with wordpress is to use something simpler - I've used dokuwiki in the past, or a quick roll-your-own database tool might be good enough.