Only a couple of more evenings of work are needed (touch wood!) on WP-United for phpBB3.

We’re getting pretty close, and it’s looking pretty good

For the initial release, I have tried to maintain feature parity with the phpBB2 version as far as possible. However, there will be a few differences — some by necessity, and a few improvements thrown in along the way. Here are the main ones:

• The mod will be much easier to apply. The mod install file for phpBB2 has grown rather large. I have tried to reduce the number of edits this time as far as possible. This is partly due to phpBB3’s better provision of APIs, but also due to a conscious effort on my part…
• Native phpBB3 permissions system. The new phpBB3 permissions system makes it easy to assign WordPress roles to your users, if you have user integration enabled.
• A mod install script will do some of the donkeywork. An install script will be provided that will set up the admin modules, permissions, and perform the SQL edits automatically.
• The user mapping tool has been rewritten. The tool now integrates into the ACP better. In addition, the phpBB3 ACP sidebar links will change depending on the WP-United options you have selected.
• Auto-disable. When disabled or uninstalled, all edits become inactive — for example the “WordPress Blog” link only appears when WP-United is fully installed and properly configured.
• The DTD switcher is more flexible. It’s not really as relevant any more, as phpBB3 uses xhtml by default. However, it could be useful for some templates, and it has been updated to identify the current WordPRess DTD and apply it to the page, if the option is enabled.
• Fixes for bugs discovered along the way. Including:
  - Integration mismatches could occur if you werealready logged into WordPress as a different user, resulting in profile sync errors
  - User mapping tool did not sync profiles when integrating users — resulting in WordPress users with unsynced profiles
  - New user data didn’t get sent to WordPress when users updated their profiles in phpBB and phpBB-in-WordPress integration was turned on.
  - Several confusing language strings in the ACP that were out of date have been corrected.

So, while there’s nothing ground-breaking here, there are (I hope) a few welcome improvements.

The best news (for me), is that the vast majority of WP-United is cross-compatible between phpBB2 & phpBB3. (most files can hopefully be dragged-and-dropped between phpBB2 & phpBB3, and still work as intended — don’t test this yet though ).

There are a few caveats, however:

• Character encoding switching is no longer an option. It didn’t really “do what it says on the tin” in phpBB2… and since phpBB3 uses UTF-8, the same as WordPress’ default, it’s not really needed anyway.
• There will be slightly more incompatibility with some WordPress templates. This is due to the way WP-United is called from within phpBB3, and will only affect people who want to embed phpBB inside their WordPress templates, have the template cache turned off, and which have custom classes declared in their WordPress templates. (i.e…. not many people). I’m working on a way around this, and it although it may make it into the release, it will probably be deferred until later.

So “enough of all this”!… when can you actually get your hands on a copy?

The answer: soon. Before the end of this week, if all goes according to plan.