Wordpress Integrated into vBulletin (Alpha Release)

[imported_silkroad]

From time to time, we read where folks want a very powerful blog like WordPress integrated into their forum. Sometimes we get answers from the vB staff talking about the vB blog, but it is really not best-of-breed, in our opinion.

We looked at the "full or semi-full" integration packages here, but they were not what we wanted. We simply wanted to integrate WordPress into the look and feel of our forum. We don't need cross-posts or single logins, just look and feel integration.

Finally, took a day and just "did it".... and here is it:

http://www.unix.com/blog/

So far, the user comments in our advisory forum have been good

[Milez]

Hey I like it. I am also looking at doing something like this with some tweaks. if you're willing to share your changes I would be happy to share mine.

[imported_silkroad]

Yes, we will share it in a blog post after it has been through a few months of testing. We still have a few bugs to work out, mostly based on the inconsistent ways that developers code URLs (relative v. absolute paths; hard coded URLs v. phrased URLs, etc.)

Not being a very good PHP programmer, I can't complain. But I do find, after many years of running vB, that a lot of add-ons and hacks are just "hacked together" and can break things. Also, a lot of the HTML in the vB code base has been deprecated over the years (causing some CSS issues). We don't want to share anything that is "just hacked" and can break other's boards.

Basically, what we did it is pretty simple but tricky if you are not comfy with modifying HTML and PHP:

• Pick a clean WP theme that you like.
• Copy it and and use that copy for your development.
• Copy the vB navbar template as navbar_blog (optional, so you can modify if you need to)
• Add a new WP PHP theme file called navbar.php (or whatever)
• Put vB navbar PHP code in that WP theme file.
• Find the same area in the WP theme files (index, singlepage, etc.) and replace the WP code with the vB navbar code (we use a require_once() php include statement).
• Do something similar for the footer code.
• Add your favorite HTML headerincludes to the WP header.php theme file.

Notes:

1. In our configuration , as you can see, the root directory is the forum and WP is in a directory.
2. If you can't get the vB links to work properly in the navbar, you can copy those PHP over to the WP directory until you get things sorted out in the vB templates.
   
3. This is only a "look and feel" integration. There is no cross posts, shared user data etc. That is exactly what we wanted.
4. Be careful with SEO add-ons. They can break things if you are not careful.