Integrating Typo into another RoR app

This might be a dumb question, but my google-fu is weak this morning and
I
can’t find any leads.

I was wondering if there is a ‘best practices’ way of integrating Typo
into
another rails app.
I am building an application that is a portfolio site, with similar
functionality to flickr. There is to be a blogging component - managed
by
the site owner, NOT individual blogs for members.I wanted to use typo
for
this, but I’m not sure of the best way to do that.

I could merge the codebases, but that would mean headaches whenever I
wanted
to upgrade Typo versions.
I could run it as a seperate web app, but I’m not sure then if I’d be
able
to integrate blog posts into other site pages.
Ideally, I’d like single sign-on and the ability to show the latest blog
posts in a sidebar of the other site pages.

I’m still rather new to this, so any help would be appreciated - I don’t
need a lot of tech details, just general direction.

Thanks,
Matt V