Ruby on Rails Integration With Wordpress

This seems to be working for me (I'm loading from Wordpress as secondary database, hence the establish_connection() calls and overriding table_name. This should get most of the way there, giving you access to the Wordpress data as ActiveRecord objects. I haven't yet written the wrapper around Posts (WPPost) to make them a bit more user friendly from an API perspective, but this should work well for Rails-based display of Wordpress data.

class Term < ActiveRecord::Base   establish_connection "wordpress-#{Rails.env}"   self.table_name = "wp_terms"   has_one :term_taxonomyendclass TermTaxonomy < ActiveRecord::Base   establish_connection "wordpress-#{Rails.env}"   self.table_name = "wp_term_taxonomy"   belongs_to :term   has_many :term_relationshipendclass TermRelationship < ActiveRecord::Base   establish_connection "wordpress-#{Rails.env}"   self.table_name = "wp_term_relationships"   belongs_to :post, :foreign_key => "object_id"   belongs_to :term_taxonomy   has_one :term, :through => :term_taxonomyendclass Post < ActiveRecord::Base   establish_connection "wordpress-#{Rails.env}"   self.table_name = "wp_posts"   has_many :term, :through => :term_relationship   has_many :term_relationship, :foreign_key => "object_id"   has_one  :postmeta   # we only care about published posts for notifications   default_scope where("post_type = 'post' and post_status = 'publish'")endclass Postmeta < ActiveRecord::Base   establish_connection "wordpress-#{Rails.env}"   self.table_name = "wp_postmeta"   belongs_to :postend

I then wrap up the category in a simple ruby object that makes accessing the data easy:

class WPCategory   attr_accessor :id   attr_accessor :name   attr_accessor :description   attr_accessor :term   def self.categories()      categories = Term.all()      categories = categories.select{|term| term.term_taxonomy.taxonomy == "category"}      return categories.map{|term| WPCategory.new(term)}   end   def self.category(id=nil)      if id         term = Term.find(id)         if term.term_taxonomy.taxonomy == "category"            return WPCategory.new(term)         end      end      return nil   end   def initialize(term)      @id = term.term_id      @name = term.name      @description = term.term_taxonomy.description      @term = term   end   def to_s      return "Wordpress Category: '#{@name}' (id=#{@id})"   endend

Here's my database.yml (make sure that your db user has read-only access to the wordpress db to avoid any ActiveRecord mishaps):

test:        adapter: mysql2        encoding: utf8        database: test-rails        pool: 5        username: test        password: XXXXXX        socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sockwordpress-test:        adapter: mysql2        encoding: utf8        database: test-wordpress        pool: 5        username: test        password: XXXXXXX        socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sockwordpress-development:        adapter: mysql2        encoding: utf8        database: wordpress        pool: 5        username: dev        password: XXXXXX        socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sockdevelopment:        adapter: mysql2        encoding: utf8        database: dev        pool: 5        username: dev        password: XXXXXX        socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

The Museum of Modern Art had a WordPress JSON API plugin built for this exact purpose: https://github.com/dphiffer/wp-json-api

This allowed them to build a RoR-based front-end layer while maintaining a WordPress-driven back-end layer.

The older answers are not relevant anymore. WordPress now provides a Rest API which can be accessed here:https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/

1) You will probably want to integrate all routing (by taking the "slug" from the articles) in your rails app to serve the articles correctly and present them with a nice "show" view.

2) If you want to store data in the rails system (e.g. for routing and to increase speed) you could create a database table called wp_articles, simply read the full article list or update relevant articles, then present them similar to your normal code.

I've looked at the non-maintained MOMA gem (not required anymore, not maintained), checked the above answer with direct database access (huge effort, slower, outdated) and read about a slighlty complex direct javascript based solution here (http://marydickson.com/how-to-use-the-wordpress-rest-api-in-rails/), but I think that simply copying the relevant info into your system and then presenting them with the normal MVC process is the easiest way.

Disadvantages: Some additional WP-Plugins provide more database fields and other information and its not clear whether you can always access those via the API. So you might have slightly limited functionality.