I've started working with a marketing team for a well established online ecommerce store.
Their site is a custom ecommerce CMS build (handled by another third party), which works well technically, but the marketing team have regularly expressed how difficult it is for them to create visually interesting and engaging pages within the site, as it's geared so much towards ecommerce.
Currently the only options the marketing team have when adding new pages from the ecommerce CMS is a textarea (single column, bold, italic, links) and a single image.
Updating the ecommerce CMS to give the marketing team greater flexibility is currently not an option (due to history and internal politics). This then led to the conversation of running 2 CMS's on the same domain - 1 for handling the ecommerce and 1 for the blog and product specific promotional landing pages. I showed them Craft, and they loved it!
The Question(s)
First off, is running 2 CMS's on the same domain possible / advisable? (I remember hearing Joel Bradbury mention running EE and WP on the same domain at EEUK)
Are there any obvious pitfalls or gotchas?
I'm assuming it would be simple enough to have Craft handle any blogs if set up on a blog URL (eg: domain.com/blogs/blog-post-name).
But what about specific landing pages (eg: domain.com/discount or domain.com/freestuff)? In theory could I create a route from the ecommerce CMS to point to the Craft generated page? Or should all marketing pages live in the same directory (eg: domain.com/marketing/discount or domain.com/marketing/freestuff)?
Ideally I'd also like to be able to dynamically insert product data (prices, images, descriptions, etc) into the blog and landing pages created in Craft from the ecommerce site. I'm assuming hooking a Craft plugin up to the ecommerce API (if there is one) would be the best option to pull in the data? (Or would scraping be an option?) We would also need to mirror the ecommerce navigation on any Craft generated pages.
The end goal is to give the marking team the freedom and flexibility to add interesting and engaging promotion pages, and have them look native and integrated into the main site.
Apologies, I know there's a lot of questions here. And some non-Craft specific, but I'm hoping this is a good place to start my investigation.
Many thanks!