I’ve been making fairly good progress with WP-United for phpBB3. While I can re-use much of the phpBB2 code, Olympus is quite a different animal in many respects.

The key differences – as far as WP-United is concerned – are in authentication and style. PhpBB3 provides many more options for integrating the logins, with roles that can be assigned to user levels, much like those of WordPress.

In terms of style, phpBB3 templates – or, at least, the subSilver template available in the Beta versions – is written much more semantically, with CSS applied to more obviously-named classes, like .post, and the page heading using h1, rather than the td/span class=”maintitle” that was phpBB2.

While this is undoubtedly A Good Thing, it presents some new issues with integrations inside the phpBB header and footer, as the WordPress and phpBB3 templates try to style common elements iin competition with each other.

While this is easily fixed with a bit of CSS twiddling, I’m keen to make the integration work well – as far as possible – out of the box. And we’re getting there: The integration package will come with the option to inspect the two stylesheets and try to work around them. This isn’t a terribly efficient way of oing things, so it will be a “run once” feature that is cached to the database.

I’m hoping to be able to release an alpha package for download later this week, so watch this space!