I’m delighted to announce – at last – the release of WP-United v0.8.0, our second release candidate.

This release – which has been "almost ready" for almost six months – is finally here, and represents a huge code overhaul, and many significant changes and additions. as part of this, the majority of WP-United code has been rewritten.

Here are some of the highlights:

• New automatic template integration fixes many conflicts between WordPress & phpBB styles, making template integration, for the most part, easy and seamless
• WP-United can be set to automatically detect and work around plugins that caused problems in earlier versions.
• Cross-posting is completely re-realised. It works better than ever before, even on scheduled posts and old posts. In addition, you can force all posts to be transparently cross-posted to a specific forum.
• You can have phpBB manage comments on blog posts — forum replies to cross-posted posts appear as WordPress comments, and comments made via the WordPress comment form can be sent to the forum. (You must be using WordPress v2.8 or above for this)
• A new WP-United caching system that reduces server load, and which is automatically cleared whenever the phpBB cache is purged.
• A new, more robust way of enabling the WP-United Connection, that captures more errors and helps you address any problems.
• A new WordPress "Forun Page" option, so your WordPress blog automatically has a navigation link pointing to your forum.
• Better handling of phpBB-in-a-full-WordPress-page template integration
• New handling of WordPress profile and user-edit pages to better administer integrated users.
• Many, many more smaller features, and hundreds of bug fixes.

As always, WP-United is completely modular – all of the existing and new features can be enabled or disabled in the WP-United Setup Wizard.

Full upgrade instructions are provided (see this post for more details). However, if you are upgrading, do try to stage an upgrade on an offline copy of your site first, if you can, particularly if you have a highly customised installation.

Please also use WP-United v0.8 with WordPress 2.9 for best results – WordPress versions older than 2.8 are no longer supported.

OK, that’s all from me – enjoy the new release, and happy blogging!