Joomla - Wordpress Integration, to look the same

Hey guys
I have an assignment for college where I am required to create a site with:

  1. A Joomla installation with a Shopping Cart
  2. A Wordpress installation with a Blog

The only condition is that both themes looks exactly the same.

Ive searched the forums and googled and all i can find is people talking about bridging the two using a Wordpress Bridge extension for Joomla. This doesn’t suit me since i need two separate backends, also i need it to be free.

A few questions:

  1. Can anyone recommend the best/modern way to go about doing this?

  2. How would i go about creating the same theme? Is it best to start from scratch with each? Or can i hack some existing theme? Or should I use a framework like Gantry or WARP?

  3. The shopping cart must still be visible and clickable when viewing the wordpress blog. How would this work, since it most likely will be a Joomla extension?

I would really appreciate any general advice, thoughts, links, anything. This isn’t a very talked about topic.

Thanks for your time

Could you run the blog on Joomla or the shopping cart on Wordpress? Is there a particular reason why you want separate platforms?

If you are set on using separate platforms and keeping a similar appearance, since each platform operates differently, you would have to develop themes separately according to each platform’s particular theming system.