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 was hoping to have v0.8 released before WordPress 2.9 — but as I want v0.8 to be the best release yet, there is still a little more work to do. It will be ready by Christmas, however.

If you would like to upgrade to WordPress 2.9 now, and are using WP-United v0.7.x, you will need to make a small edit to the file wp-united/wp-integration-class.php, as follows:

Find the line // or you could add your own here

And after it, on a new line, add:'wp_embed',.

Alternatively, hang tight for all the new features and bug fixes in v0.8 — watch this space!

WP-United lives on thanks to you

Many apologies for not posting here for such a long time. WP-United development has been stalled for the past year while I have had to attend with personal life — a new job, and more recently, the financial crisis.

The current version of WP-United up on the download page here is out of date — it will need a few changes in order to work with the latest versions of phpBB3 and WordPress. The good news is that, thanks to the power of open source, and resourceful users, WP-United lives on!

You can find the latest version of WP-United here at nitemarecafe.com.

Help needed!

I apologise for not being able to answer support questions on the forum. However, I would like this site to continue as a useful resource, and intend to return to active WP-United maintenance, provided I have some help.

WP-United is big enough to warrant being managed and developed as a community, so, in the meantime, I am looking for:

• Developers — If you have been keeping WP-united up-to-date yourselves, I would like to have your patches submitted against the WP-United SVN tree here. Please contact me for commit privileges.
• One or two forum moderators — people who are already active on the forums, and would enjoy helping people out where necessary. These people could also field their own support/installation services if they wanted to, via the support section of this site. Even though I can’t visit as often as I would like, I hope that they can still facilitate support and user interaction.

If you are able to help in either of the above roles, please post in the comments to this blog post.

Server move

Finally, in order to keep this site alive, I will be migrating it to a new server in the coming days. For a short period, the blog and forums will be locked, to ensure the process goes smoothly. Everything, including the URL, will be the same after the move.

[Update: The server move is now complete -- if you are reading this update, then welcome to the new server! If you spot any problems, please add a comment to this blog entry]

Happy blogging!

John

Just a quick reminder to everyone

I’ve been keen to fill the gallery to show off WP-United’s features to new users (there’s nothing better than seeing it in action on real sites). Up until now, I’ve been adding sites regardless of whether they link back to WP-United.com or not. In actual fact, the vast majority do — so I’m pretty happy.

However, there are a growing number of new sites which have dumped the included link from their footer, or haven’t linked to us at all. To be clear, this is your prerogative (provided the copyright statements in the PHP code remain completely intact) — however, links back to us are one of this site’s main lifelines. Without them, far fewer people would find the site — either directly or via Google.

Feel free to modify the link, or move it to a separate “credits” page. I understand some sites want to make it look like they are developed in-house, or believe in security through obfuscation, but in reality there’s really very little reason not to link back — some very large sites are doing so.

Also, a few people have kindly written about WP-United on their sites or blogs. Some have even written tutorials in their own languages. This is fantastic, something I love to see

The stick: eventually, when the gallery fills up, I’ll start being a bit stricter with who stays in there The carrot: The more people discover WP-United, the more incentive there will be to keep it developing rapidly.

Thanks to everyone who is already supporting WP-United — either by donating, linking, contributing code or translations, writing about us or recommending us to peers. It is much appreciated.

As the readme file introducing the WP-United template tags is missing from the phpBB3 download, as as I’ve been meaning to do a proper write-up for months now, I’ve put together a page, All About Template Tags.

For most users, the provided widgets should be sufficient. However, if customisation is your “thing”, then this page is for you!

Sorry for being a bit ‘hands off’ the last week — had a long weekend in Hong Kong, but managed to get in a spot of work on WP-United for phpBB3. (More…)

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. (More…)

WP-United is now well-tested with PermaLinks — the nice-style URLs that Search engine spiders find easier to crawl and index. Since v0.8.9.x, you don’t have to mod any files to set them up – however you want them.

If you are not currently using Permalinks with WP-United, you should seriously consider doing so. You’ll be surprised at the difference they make. At the very least, your site will have pretty and easily navigable addresses. If you’ve enabled per-user blogs, your users will surely appreciate yoursite.com/blogs/author/myname far more than an ugly query string.

Here’s how to do it: (More…)