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.

You will have noticed that I haven’t been around much in the last two weeks. I have some leave at work coming up, and as such, have been trying to clear my desk before I go, meaning I haven’t had much time to myself.

I normally manage to check off forum posts at lunch times and in the evenings, that that just hasn’t been possible recently. Thank you to everyone who has been helping out on the forums — especially DeaconFrost, Vertical, and all the other regulars.

I am still tight for time before I go, but have managed to clear the Installation Support forum today, and hope to do the same for the Bug Report forum too.

Once I’m on holiday, I should get a bit more time to catch up — including a long haul flight or two to spend a bit of time working on v0.9 . It is essential that I proceed on v0.9 as WordPress 3 is looming ever-closer.

If you have e-mailed with a support request, I am sorry for the tardy response — but my priority is finishing off existing requests and catching up with the forum. I will be accepting more requests when things quieten down a bit. Meanwhile, the offer still stands for experienced members here to subcontract on support requests– if you are interested, please let me know.

John

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.