On a few occasions I have come accross a situation where I needed to install a Wordpress blog installation to an ecommerce website. The main problem here is integrating the two systems. It is often difficult to make the sidebar in Wordpress dynamic with the website, leaving the sidebar static often leaves the blog and site navigation different as categories in the site have changed. This can result in 404 errors if you don’t manually change the Wordpress navigation.

There is however an easy solution to the problem. You can create a dynamic RSS feed from your ecommerce site that simply contains the category name and URL. After you have created this RSS feed yo should then install the ‘advanced RSS widget’ for Wordpress. This widget allows you to add any RSS feed into the sidebar.

Once installed you can add the location of the latest categries RSS feed into the appropriate sidebar. This will now display a list of categories from the site that is dynamic, all you need to do now is style it up in CSS. Now when you change your site your category navigation will update.

Problem fixed!