How much do you really blog on your Magento shop?
10 Comments 4th DEC 2009 | Posted by Branko Ajzele in Magento
Does it make sense to use aheadWorks Blog extension over WordPress? To newcomers to this site, this article might be a bit strange and confusing. One would surely ask himself, why would do these guys write about using aheadWorks Blog extension over WordPress in Magento, given that the do WordPress and Magento integrations plus all sort of custom Magento development.
Let me try to elaborate on this. First question you, as a site owner, must ask yourself is: How much do you really intend to blog on you Magento powered shop? I don’t mean to be cheeky here, but let me answer that one: A little! I have yet to see the the shop site owner that really regularly blogs (writes articles) on his shop. To those who do, respect. For those who don’t go beyond creating a post or two in a week, I would suggest they consider carefully next time they go for WordPress integration in Magento.
There are several bottlenecks when doing “integration” of WordPress and Magento. One of them is the term of “integration” itself. Mostly these are just visual integrations, meaning we sync the look of WordPress to the one of Magento or vice versa. This leads to whole bunch of later dissatisfaction. Site owner expects them to logically behave as one unit. They expect that whoever logs into Magento as a customer can post comments to WordPress post, write posts, etc. The thing is, that integration is “visual only”, meaning you still have completely two different systems, two different logins etc. Thus, showing latest blog post in some Magento blog on some checkout page is a tedious and time consuming task since you need to work out all sort of tricks to get it up and running. Time equals money, and final costs simply do not justify the investment in such integration given the small amount of blog post content you might actually put on the blog.
By now, few really quality Magento extensions can be found both for free and commercially. One of my favorite Magento extensions is aheadWorks Blog extension.
Below are few screenshots that show extension installation, configuration, process of creating a categories, posts and comments (in zip archive, having issues with file upload and memory on hosting 
).
There are several drawbacks to using blog inside Magento then to use WordPress for your blogging. One of them is a photo upload feature that WordPress handles for you. Inside WordPress post edit area you have a nice button that lets you easily upload the photo and even create a mini gallery from there. Unfortunately, in Magento 1.3 and this blog extension you will not find something like that. You are forced to upload photos manually by FTP then link to them via urls. To me, this kind of approach is something I can live with.
Another thing site owners see as a drawback in not using a WordPress integration are all those fancy WordPress plugins. Well, in respect to few of the WordPress plugin developers all I have to say is: Please stay away from WordPress plugins in web shop business. I cannot stress our how poor the quality of the code is in most of them (at least those which I had the opportunity to check).
To get back to the point of this article, I am merely trying to point out that each and every site owner should think twice before asking for WordPress and Magento integration. Simpler and more stable solution exists. All you need to do is to clear our your own priorities. So, do not go with Wordpress and Magento integration unless it is really needed.
Hope this was helpful.
Cheers.
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There are 10 comments (Add Yours +)
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December 4th, 2009 at 12:22
This is one of our most common office discussions “WordPress vs. Blog extension” a.k.a. “Marketers vs. Developers”.
From the marketing point of view, I’d always go with WordPress, however, benefit of WordPress often don’t justify the cost of proper implementation or “integration” of WordPress and Magento.
I think the crucial question here is the question from the title of the post – how much do you really intend to use that blog? If you’re building a big content marketing strategy and plan to invest loads of time and effort daily into that blog, I’d advise you to go with WordPress.
December 4th, 2009 at 13:33
I agree with Tony. Before a client invests time & money integrating Wordpress, they first need to take a serious look at the purpose behind the blog and resource allocation to maintain it. Who will be writing the content? How often will they commit to posting? What keywords are they targeting? etc… It is far too common to see a retailer try to implement a blog “because this store over here has a blog and it’s cool.”
That being said, thank you for articulating a few of the viable integration options for Magento + Wordpress. What about other CMS platforms? What has your experience been with systems like Drupal, Joomla, and ExpressionEngine?
December 4th, 2009 at 14:02
@Josh
Nice to hear form you Josh. Thanks for the input.
To reply on the “What about other CMS platforms?”. Its a crowded world out there
-Personally, I would take Drupal and day before WordPress. Strangely to say because I am running ActiveCodeline on WordPress (only because I did not worked with Drupal before). Somehow I see Drupal far more developer friendly, and more important I see its logic better fitted for integrating with Magento. Marketing “experts” will say Drupal is less SEO, bla bla… Sure it is, out of the box, but give it some attention, do your SEO magic and you will end up with far more flexible system then WordPress. I dislike Joomla since I see it as a bloated mix of WordPress and Drupal, but thats just my personal opinion 
Also, when I say developer friendly for Drupal, it does not mean that with little admin css it cant get more user friendly as well
December 7th, 2009 at 12:51
Hi,
I would just like to add a different perspective to this discussion:
Most store owners tend be less technically-oriented. Therefore their understanding of the technical issues is much less than those who build their store. An immediate effect of this is the way the store owner sees how he interacts with the blog, rather how the blog functions, or which plugins does it have.
Therefore store owners usability is also a factor in determining which blog solution is best. I personally haven’t tested ahead’s Blog extension, would love to hear someone comment on it here.
December 7th, 2009 at 14:02
@Avi
“… store owners usability is also a factor in determining which blog solution is best …” => I would disagree. I don’t see my blogging skills diminished when using less blogger tool. Those who know how to write and are willing will most certainly not be discouraged by less user friendly text box in which they dump their text.
December 8th, 2009 at 8:01
True but not true. Some of our clients don’t even have a clue about what’s going on, but do want to post their articles / news / announcements.
“Those who know how to write and are willing…” => depends on client.
December 15th, 2009 at 23:32
yeah, aw_blog works great on magento. i agree with the general consensus. forums….. now theres a thing…. where is the forum extention???
January 22nd, 2010 at 22:36
We’ve made a minor up extension to supplement a Magento/Wordpress integration.
We’ve made it available here: http://www.sonassi.com/knowledge-base/magento-knowledge-base/simple-and-effective-wordpress-and-magento-integration/
January 25th, 2010 at 15:29
Thank you for sharing. I am going to try aheadWorks on my site.
March 4th, 2010 at 20:00
Thank you again for your views on the aheadworks blog.
I understand that integrating a blog as part of a Magento store and regularly blogging will help with SE rankings. How does the aheadworks module compare with a wordpress integration in this respect?