Busy, busy these days — very little time to devote to WP-United. However, I have made some progress with the next version.

First up is a new feature that many have been waiting for: Cross-posting.

If you enable this feature, you will find a new box on the WordPress “Write Post” page. Here, you can select whether you want to “cross-post”, and select a forum to cross-post to. When you submit the post, a topic will be created in that forum. The topic will be an excerpt of your blog post (or the full post, if you did not specify an excerpt, or did not use the “more” tags), complete with HTML converted to BBCode, a list of categories it was posted to, and a link back to the full post. The topic title can be automatically prefixed with text (say, “[BLOG]”).

You can select which users have permission to cross-post for individual forums using phpBB3’s permissions panel. This means it is easy to fine-tune.

Right now, once the post is created, it lives independently — Blog comments go to the blog, and forum replies go to the forum, without duplication. Post edits also do not affect each other. This behaviour will likely be fleshed out in future versions, depending on demand.

Another thing that has been (superficially) missing is an add-on to enable users to display the latest blog posts on their phpBB portal (for an example, see here). I say “superficially”, because the “show latest posts” code has actually been included since the first phpBB3 release — all that is needed is an example for how to use it. (It could also do with a bit of caching).

Several bugs are also fixed:

• User profile links weren’t always getting created
• The “latest registered user” link in the widget didn’t point to the correct place
• A couple of minor language file errors were fixed.

I still need to do further testing with phpBB3 RC4 & WordPress 2.2.2. However, v0.6 is getting close to releasable.

Release Candidate for phpBB2 version planned

At this stage, this means the phpBB3 version has made quite significant progress over the phpBB2 version, and, barring a few improvements, is reasonably stable. If time allows, I would like to sync. the phpBB2 version to the phpBB3 version, and release both new versions at around the same time. This means that (with luck) a “release candidate” for phpBB2 is on the cards

“Release candidate” means that I believe you can be confident running WP-United on live sites. Obviously - I, and many others, are already doing so, and so this release candidate reflects this. But with a release candidate, the code base should be more stable, and less liable to breakage between each release. In addition, you can rely on upgrade paths between releases.

The only bad news at this stage is that I am reluctant to provide an upgrade path from v0.9.7 Beta to v0.9.9 RC — you will likely have to note down your settings and integration table, then remove any Beta version, before applying the new version. The good news is that this will give everyone a “clean slate”, making support easier.

Again — this is dependent on time. I’m hoping to get things together within a week or so, but no firm promises yet….. Stay tuned. In the meantime, happy blogging