Anyhoo, it’s Wordpress driving the pages & posts, and a CakePHP (1.3) app handling exhibitors, registration and sponsors.
We’re using the Wordpress plugin WPML for the multilingual side of things.
I’m putting it up here mainly in case it helps anyone else get wordpress & cake playing together.
Uses some .htaccess rewrites to route things to wordpress install in webroot, and in the functions.php of the expozine theme, you’ll see we just fetch the fragments we need from cake to display sponsors & exhibitors.
Why not use the custom post types/taxonomy in wordpress?
On the surface, it looked like custom post types would be fine. But at the time, I couldn’t find any clear answers that I could do what I needed to, including making it bilingual ( one of my biggest gripes with wp - the docs/codex - eg: sometime I search for a problem, and you find stuff from WP 1.5. I feel like they should have a docs tzar :) ).
WPML wasn’t clear at the time (it’s been updated the last few months I think). I didn’t have the time to go down that rabbit hole. And it’s pretty some simple relational data, and form validation. Getting that portion of the site up fast was the motivation.
So the old pages from the site were thrown into cake pages, and Wordpress was added after.
If I have to do this again, I think i would move the cake install to a subdomain, and just install wp on www. That should be the simpler solution. Just in this case, I started with the cake driven side. Or, who knows - i may have reason to dive further into wp, in which case, might just go with custom post types. I’ve since learnt what I want to do can pretty much be done all in wp.
So, if you are interested in this topic, or looking for some help, check out the full readme. Any feedback on the solution is welcome as well.