Pulling one web site into another

PHP
1

Hi all,

We are a wholesaler and have built an online catalog site (just a catalog, not ecommerce) of our products (using a RocketTheme Joomla template). Some of our smaller customers would like to be able to do a live feed of our catalog right into their existing site.

I know one method is for our customers to use an iframe to accomplish this. I’m wondering if that is the best practice or if anyone has any better suggestions?

Thanks for your input!

2

There are several ways you could do this, but how feasible they are depends on your technical skills and also the skill of your customers:

  1. iframe - this is probably the easiest, create an HTML page they can load into their website
  2. create an XML feed, something like an RSS feed containing your products. They can then load this and integrate the products in their own site using PHP or some other server side language
  3. create a JavaScript widget, where they can load a javascript file from your server which provides functions for printing out a list of your products.

The last two will require more work, but will look more… seamless on the customers site. The first option is the easiest, but iframes always look a bit disjointed to me.