Question

Photo of Robert Cuyar

0

WordPress Front-end and Rock RMS Back-end

3

We are considering the implementation of the Rock RMS; however, one of our challenges is our Marketing team would prefer using WordPress for the Front-end verses the imbedded Rock themes.   Understanding the Rock is designed as an intergrated solutions the question still needs to be asked.

If that is the route we go.. can the RMS modules be called from a WordPress front-end?

Thank you!!

  • Photo of Jim Michael

    4

    The two strategies I've seen used in these situations are: 

    - Create a Rock theme that mimicks precisely the look (menu, everything) of your main site. When users click (for example) Online Giving, they are actually navigating to a completely different (Rock) web site but it looks the same as your "real" web site and most users don't even realize anything has changed. This is not as hard as it sounds, as you can (with some web talent) make a Rock web site look like anything you want. Don't assume that the built-in themes are what every Rock site will look like!

    - iFrame certain portions of Rock into the main web site. In this scenario you actually "theme" the Rock components to be plain and simple so they embed nicely. This is relatively easy to implement but has some downsides, like how the browser treats certificates in the iFrame vs. the main page. 

    That said, if you MUST use WP as the front end, I think option #1 provides the best user experience. It's just a matter of someone making Rock look like your main site. Then again, if you have the talent to get that far, you might as well just make Rock your web site ;-)

    • Bronson Witting

      Bronson Witting

      We are doing a variant of what Jim mentioned in the first strategy. Our site is newpointe.org (built on WordPress), and we have the external Rock items at my.newpointe.org - branded MyNewPointe. People know they are on a "different" site, but the style and branding is very similar to newpointe.org. We've had great experience with this so far - skinning Rock was painless for our Communications department (we have a frontend developer on staff) and our users seem to really like the experience.


      We plan on moving away from WordPress and using Rock as our main CMS at some point.

    • Photo of Matt Baylor

      0

      Short Answer: Not Directly

      Longer Answer: It would be possible to write a set of widgets as a plugin in WordPress that would access the RockRMS API, but to my knowledge that has not been done... Yet.

    • Photo of Tim Lemons

      0

      Oh man a Wordpress plugin would ROCK! who's gonna be the hero to develop that?

      • Arran France

        Arran France

        At RX2016 the new Lava endpoint stuff was released that allows you to ferry information between any website and your Rock instance.


        That said I'm not sure how much you gain by not using Rock's CMS tools which offer much tighter integration.

        • Trey Hendon III

          Trey Hendon III

          Additionally, the tools mentioned at the conference are more about displaying content on your WP site, generated from the CMS tools in Rock.


          It does not solve the "problem" of event registration, online giving, or other user input blocks in Rock. Additionally, there are vast arrays of security and PCI compliance that have to be considered and how the implications of an API call affects that kind of traffic.


          All of that to say, what Jim mentioned about the "my" portal would be my recommendation as well if you are planning to keep WP as your primary CMS.