How to integrate together a website currently hosted Wordpress.com and a custom web application currently hosted on Azure?

Question

Background:

• I am a C# developer and have developed a web site/application that can be hosted on Azure (or any Linux server).

• Another person has created a Wordpress blog and he is managing it through standard hosting service provided by Wordpress.com

Problem:

1. We want to fuse our sites together so they are accessible through a single domain name. Ideally it would be seamless and we should navigate from Article/Post pages created in Wordpress to URLs handled and rendered by the web app backend program.

2. We would like to be able to "embed" content generated from the web app into posts created from the Wordpress admin backoffice.

I have no clue what is the best way how to achieve that but I see a few possibilities:

1. Use a "headless" Wordpress setup by using the Wordpress REST API?
2. Use a subdomain of the Wordpress domain for accessing the webapp functionalities?
3. Write a Wordpress plug-in that connects to the webapp by calling some urls?

I have many questions about the details of each of these...maybe there are also better solutions?

Answer 1

To handle the single domain, you'll want to obtain hosting that will run both your currently Azure-hosted site and WordPress. Usually Linux is the easiest way to go, though WP can run on IIS.

You basically need to migrate the existing Azure-hosted site. Then, you can install WordPress in either a subdomain or a subfolder. If you want the two sites to appear to be one, a subfolder is your best bet.

Note, WordPress.com is a fully hosted solution that's very limited (and not actually supported on this site). What you'll need to do is set up self-hosted WordPress from WordPress.org and then migrate over your content. You can then build a custom theme so that your header and footer on the "other" site and the WordPress site are seamless.

As far as embedding content from the "other" site, it really depends on what type of content you're trying to embed and what APIs are available on the "other" end. When you set up the custom theme, you can also build in functionality to pull in external data through APIs or RSS feeds. If you're placing specific content in specific places, you can accomplish this with PHP and JS in the theme. If instead you want to embed content in various places, you may want to look into building WP Blocks, which use React, and will allow you to add content in any post/page/CPT in any part of the main content area.