Most phpBB-based sites fall into two categories: Those where phpBB is used as an add-on feature of the main site: for example, as a support forum; and those where a phpBB community is the site.

Sites in the latter category live and breathe ‘community’ — and are often places for pre-existing off-line communities to discuss topics and meet online. Often, such sites using a stock phpBB install spring up and attract large numbers of users — without even a custom design or other site features. It usually doesn’t take long, however, for users to request new features, and a nice portal page summarizing news or announcements is usually the first request.

Smartor’s ezPortalhas been the bread and butter of phpBB portal pages for years (at least as long as I have been using phpBB) – and you can see it in use all over the Internet. (I use it here – here are some other random examples. As you can see, they are instantly recognisable.). It’s a simple mod, and generally works well, providing a lot of functions to integrate with the forum. Unfortunately, however, the default styling (which is often left unchanged), can be rather monotonous, and is more often than not awash with unneeded nested tables and presentational markup.

So why not try something new? WordPress is more than just a neat blogging tool - it is a fairly lightweight CMS, and an easy article posting system. It makes for a great community portal page. What’s more, the ever-growing list of widgets and plugins make adding features to the page pretty painless.

WP-United makes it easy to use WordPress as a portal page for your phpBB forums — you can integrate WordPress easily inside your existing phpBB header and footer. The site you are looking at now is doing it… so is the new integration at shutterzone.net .

New and re-organised template tags will be available in WP-United v0.9.0 to help users add phpBB features to their WordPress front page…. and if you’re just upgrading to the phpBB3 beta and are looking for a portal page, an alpha version of WP-United for Olympus will be available soon.

With the huge range of beautiful templates at themes.wordpress.net, there’ll be no excuse for having a portal page that looks “the same as all the others!”