Just to let everyone know that WP-United v0.8.4 is taking shape, and will be released soon — hopefully this evening. This release tries to improve the installation experience, and fixes all reported outstanding bugs.

• Better error messages when WP-United is installed in the wrong order, or settings are not correct
• A smoother install process, with no need to run the wpu-install.php installer any more
• Several minor bugs with cross-posting resolved, including timezone problems and problems when editing posts and announcements
• Several other outstanding issues resolved

Unless major bugs are reported against this version, this is expected to be the last WP-United release in the v0.8x branch. So, you won’t have to keep updating every week.. for a few weeks, anyway .For details on v0.9, and to participate in the discussion on changes and new features, please visit the Forum.

So, if you were looking for something to do over the weekend… watch this space!

Unless something goes terribly wrong, WP-United v0.8 will be released later today. (‘Today’ was supposed to be ‘yesterday’ but, due to ongoing testing, there are a few additional last-minute changes to cross-posting).

This afternoon I will briefly disable access to this site while we upgrade this site, and shortly thereafter I will post upgrade instructions here.

Apologies for the various bits of downtime over the last 24 hours — I have moved the VPS that holds WP-United.com, among various other sites, to a different continent. The move is now complete — if you are seeing this, then welcome to the new server!

If you notice any problems, please let me know. However, for all intents and purposes, things should be identical to the way they were before.

In the next couple of days, there will be a small amount of downtime as this site migrates to v0.8 of WP-United — consider it final testing just before I get to finally release it. In the meantime, any help in testing v0.8 and reporting bugs in the appropriate forum is, as always, much appreciated.

If you are testing WP-United v0.8 (on a non-live webserver, of course), I have just checked in a large number of updates, that fix several show-stopper bugs.

Please update to the latest version by updating from http://www.wp-united.com/svn/trunk . However, please note that several changes have been made to the install.xml file — the number of code edits is significantly reduced.

For testing, I recommend testing on a virgin forum, but if you want to update your existing test v0.8 installation, please follow the directions in the latest contrib/../upgrade.xml file — in particular, the parts that get you to look for previous WP-United code edits and ask you to remove them.

People who don’t want to set their server on fire will still need to wait for the final release of v0.8 — as always, it should be soon. However, if you do have time to test and report bugs on a development server, it would be much appreciated.

Sorry for once again having “real work” taking over my life. WP-United is till very much alive, and I hope to be able to release v0.8 before Christmas.

I do, however, still need help with the forums — thank you to those who are already moderating and helping out with queries. Any more help is much appreciated.

I have a bit of holiday coming my way, and hope to be able to use it to ensure WP-United stays on track, and get around to providing some support services. In the meantime, do not hesitate to check out v0.8 from http://www.wp-united.com/svn and let me know how it goes.

John

It’s been a busy few weeks, but I have been able to do a lot of work on the exciting next release of WP-United.

The integration code has been reworked from the ground-up, with the aim of simplifying the code, while incorporating an exciting new automatic template integration system.

I will have a preview available later today or tomorrow for you to download and test out. In the meantime, I wanted to introduce the new template system — what it is, and how it works, along with some screenshots

(More…)

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’ve just upgraded the site — at long last — to WordPress 2.7.1, latest phpBB3, and latest WP-United.

EDIT: It was such a long time since we cleaned ship, some of the phpBB files had crusted over, preventing some users from being able to log in — after a bit of spring cleaning this morning, things are back to normal!

This also allowed me to iron out a few final issues with the about-to-be-released WP-United v0.6.5. We should be close to a release soon.

I am — finally — putting the finishing touches on WP-United v0.6.5. This new official release will be compatible with WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 (and all older versions!), and will fix a few known issues.

I hope to have it released before WP 2.8 goes final.

if you would like to test it in advance of the release, please post here.

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