I’m making some more progress with WP-United v0.9… the brand new settings panel is now operational, and can transfer its settings out to phpBB. This is much simpler to use, and complerely replaces the “Setup Wizard” on the phpBB side.

This marks a major shift in the way WP-United works conceptually. Prior to v0.9 we have always been a “phpBB mod”. The Setup Wizard was quite innovative for phpBB — certainly more so than most other phpBB mods. However, the phpBB ACP hasn’t served us well. It still requires some actions to be taken by the user to see the WP-United Setup Wizard, and in general, the rest of the ACP is a bit of a mess with too many options buried under menus.

Leveraging WordPress’ plugin system better

We’ve always used WordPress’ plugin system in WP-United, but most of the core code sat outside that, under your forum directory.

v0.9 will change that. Now that the panel is working, my plan is to move most, if not all, of the WP-United files (that currently sit under your-forum/wp-united) to a plugin folder in phpBB. I’d like users to be able to automatically download and install the plugin using the WordPress plugin browser — this will hopefully go a long way to achieving that.

However, we still have one snag: phpBB still requires some code edits. Over the last few versions, we’ve cut down the number of edits required significantly, but there are still plenty. In the interest of releasing v0.9 sometime this century, I will start off simply, by including instructions in the WordPress plugins panel with a link to the XML file containing instructions on editing phpBB.

While this should be fairly clear, it’s not a great solution in the long run. Every time a user has to manually edit files, things can go wrong (no arrogance here — I make mistakes installing it myself very frequently). I’d be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on how this should work for v1.0.

Likely way forward for v1.0

I’ve done a bit of thinking, and right now, I think the following would work best:

• Distribute a customized version of the AutoMod engine with WP-United.
• After the user fills in the WP-United basic settings in WordPress, we inspect the phpBB installation. If AutoMod is already installed there, we give a link to a zip file and ask the user to install it using their pre-existing AutoMod (likely they are already comfortable using it)
• If they don’t, we give them a choice: install manually or automatically. An automatic installation would back up phpBB files and apply changes the bast way we can. The inner-workings of AutoMod would be hidden from the user. A manual installation would be the same as planned for v0.9.

Alternative: A pre-mod option

The idea of a pre-mod option is for WordPress users who haven’t already installed phpBB. They could go to the plugin browser, and in a couple of clicks, install a fully integrated, WP-United phpBB. The phpBB install could even be completely managed — hidden in a plugin subfolder and exposing forum pages via permalinks.

This would undoubtedly be cool, and would bring in tons of new users while reducing support requests — but I can see that maintenance would be a big problem. With each release of phpBB I would have a lot more work to do, and that would take time away from what’s important: Maintaining the WP-United core. In addition, users who installed this way would get a nasty shock when it came to installing new phpBB themes: they’d still have to learn how to do mod edits then.

The only way I think this would work is having a user-contributed repository of pre-edited themes at WP-United.com so that phpBB turns into an end-to-end point-and-click install for WordPress users. Maybe this is something we can consider for v2.0. (However, hopefully by that time, phpBB will already be sporting a decent plugin system).

Due to the above, I’ve discounted this option for now, but I am excited about the possibility for a future version.

Your thoughts?

I’d be interested in hearing from users with a WordPress (rather than a phpBB) background as to how the install should work in an ideal world.

Thinking from a WordPress administrator’s perspective, is a completely managed phpBB install desirable? Or would you rather have a separate install which requires some management (and the inevitable bugs that accompany it)?

If we, in the long run, opted for the former, would you be interested in contributing to the community by helping to maintain one-click-install repositories of modified phpBB code and themes?

I’ve been travelling the last few weeks, with limited Internet access, so while I have been very bad at responding to e-mails and messages on the forums, I have managed to make a lot of progress with the next big version of WP-United:

• blog.php is gone: WP-United will no longer need it, making installation for new users much simpler.
• The way WordPress is called has changed: it will now be compatible with nearly all plugins, without needing most plugin fixes.
• The installation process is in the process of being changed. The Wizard / Setup Page is being moved from phpBB to WordPress, and will be much easier to use. Below is a sneak preview. Highlights include an interactive filelist for setting paths, tabbed/sliding menus, much more clarity in options, and (hopefully) no more “Step 5″ blues.

New Control Panel 1

New Control Panel 2

While you are welcome to check out and test v0.9, it is still in the process of undergoing open heart surgery. Many portions of code are temporary and subject to change, and the new control panel is not yet finished.

I envisage that things will start to crystallize in 2 weeks or so, and then hopefully testing will be easier and more people can follow along — watch this space!

I will be back on a regular schedule from the end of next week too.

WP-United v0.8.1 contains fixes for bugs reported in the forum since the release of v0.8.0, including regressions in avatar support, and a permissions bug that prevented posting follow-up comments.
In addition, 20 minor other bugs are fixed.

Upgrading from v0.8.0 is easy — you just need to copy over the new files, purge the cache, and run the Setup Wizard again (an upgrade.xml file is included with details instructions).

If you are upgrading from v0.7x or earlier, see these instructions.

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:
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Now that WP-United v0.8 is released, you will be wondering how to upgrade an existing v0.7x installation.

The procedure is simple. However, while you are upgrading, site visitors will receive errors, and certain pages will be inaccessible. It is therefore important that you bring your site offline during the upgrade process. The easiest way is probably to require a username and password using your .htaccess and an htpasswd file.

Once your site is offline, you are ready to upgrade. Open the file contrib/upgrading_from_v0.5.5_or_later/upgrade.xml in your browser, and read through the instructions before beginning.

Then follow the below steps:

• Delete your phpbb-root/wp-united directory from your server — it contains old files that need to be removed.
• Perform all the file copies and edits indicated in the upgrade.xml file — there are edits to three files, and you need to copy everything from root to your live site. If you renamed or moved blog.php, don’t forget to replace it with the new one for v0.8, and then edit it and provide the path back to phpBB, like you did before.
• Next, open up the file wp-united/options.php on your server,find the option WPU_DISABLE, and change the option from FALSE to TRUE. This will temporarily disable WP-United so you can complete the upgrade.
• Visit your phpBB Admin Control Panel, and purge the phpBB cache. This is important, without this the new WP-United hooks may not run.
• Visit the WP-United Setup Wizard, and run it all the way through.
• When completed, go back to your wp-united/options.php and change WPU_DISABLE from TRUE back to FALSE

Your upgrade should now be complete. Surf your site and play with the various new options. When satisfied, re-enable access to your site.

Remember that WP-United v0.8 contains many additions and changes. It is recommended that you test it on an offline copy of your forum first to ensure the upgrade will fit your needs before upgrading your live site.

Happy blogging!

I’ll be on the phpBB Weekly live podcast this weekend at 16:00 UTC this Saturday (27 June) to discuss WP-United.

Be sure to come along and ask questions if you’re interested. Hopefully I won’t be too boring You can listen and participate live at www.phpbbweekly.net.

I’m delighted to finally be able to announce the first release candidate of WP-United for phpBB3.

Here’s what’s new: (More…)

Sorry for the delay with this one — work has been busy (and interesting), leaving me less time and energy in the evenings to focus my attention on WP-United.

I’ve also been a little weary of the sheer number of RC releases for phpBB — I was a proponent of another beta release prior to going RC, and you can see why! Each release has required a fair few template changes — which, on my sites with customised themes, means a lot of time wasted updating software when I’d rather be programming!

Anyway — since phpBB3 RC7 seems relatively stable, I have prepared another interim release, updated to install with phpBB3 RC7. As previously, if all is OK, I shall release this as a new version in the coming days.

Download it here: V0.6 Preview

Happy blogging!

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]“).

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I’m delighted to announce the release of WP-United v0.5.5 for phpBB3.

In the first week since WP-United for phpBB3 was released, I received a fair amount of feedback, and a few bug reports. v0.5.5 is designed to address them.

The major changes are as follows: (More…)