Integration with vBulletin - Complete Wordpress/Vbulletin Bridge - Share Users And Postings

Identical to this Mod here, but now for the Vbulletin 3.8 line.

DOES NOT WORK FOR Vbulletin 4.x

This version probably no longer works for Wordpress 3.x. I have started developing this product over and have released the NEW version here:

http://www.lampwrights.com/showthread.php?t=41

This mod bridges your Vbulletin users over to Wordpress. You can also use Vbulletin as your comment engine instead of the spammy one built into Wordpress. You can display the comments inline in your post. You need not use the comment feature, if your only interested in sharing users.

You can map your Vbulletin Usergroups to Wordpress Usergroups and those users will then be recognized as registered Wordpress users.

For example, user "Joe" registers at your forum and logs in. Joe then clicks on your Wordpress page. Joe is instantly added to the Wordpress user base with the permissions you set for his usergroup. In otherwords, if a user comes over belonging to the "Registered User" group, you can select that he is placed in the Wordpress "Subscriber" usergroup.

If you change a users group from vbulletin, it will automatically change in Wordpress.

Requirements:

• DOES NOT and WILL NEVER support Wordpress MU.
• Wordpress and Vbulletin scripts must reside on the same physical server.
• Wordpress and Vbulletin must use the same domain name.
• Stable Wordpress Version greater than or equal to 2.7.
• DOES work for Vbulletin 3.7.
• Does work for vBulletin 3.8.

Limitations:

• Does not work for 4.x. Why? Because VB 4.x does not work for me. If they ever make that product worth a shit, I might support it.
• Please don't ask if it works for any BETA versions of Vbulletin. I do not know and will not convert this to the latest version of VB (whatever it is at the time you are reading this) until the version is released as non-beta.
• Does not work with XMLRPC.
• Chances are, this will not work when VB and Wordpress are located in different sub domains. I.E. forum.yoursite.com - blog.yoursite.com. Cookie issue.
• I did the best I could in determining your forums file path with the script. There may be certain script setups that cannot find the file path properly, in which case you may get errors that the script cannot find or open /config.php. If this is the case, please HARDCODE your ABSOLUTE path to the forum in vbridge.php.
  
  To do this find:
  
  

   ## If you are having path problems, uncomment this next variable and define the path
  ## NO TRAILING SLASH!
  # $vwd = '/some/path/to/your/forum';

  And uncomment the last line, and change the path to your forums path:
  
  

   ## If you are having path problems, uncomment this next variable and define the path
  ## NO TRAILING SLASH!
  $vwd = '/some/path/to/your/forum';

Common Mistakes When Installing:

• Using two different host names causes problems. If your forum URL contains www.yourdomain.com, then your wordpress blog URL MUST contain the www. part of www.yourdomain.com also. This goes for any other host name. Browsers are finnecky when it comes to cookies (as they should be).
• Editors generally EDIT, not write. In Wordpress, editors don't show up in the post author drop down. This has nothing to do with this plugin, that is Wordpress code.
• Make sure you DO NOT create a subdirectory for this plugin in the wp-content/plugins directory. Just upload it directly there..
• If you do not map users before you turn auto-integrate on, the plugin has no idea whether your allowed into the dashboard.
• If you all of a sudden can't login to the dashboard, see the above two common mistakes.
• FOLLOW the directions and make a test post first. Being in a rush and not testing will most likely turn out bad for you.

UPDATES:

Changelog is included in download, here is the most recent changes:

3/09/2009

• Added code to process scheduled posts
• Addressed code where links and images would not show up properly in VB
• Added new table called vb_forumid for scheduled posts
• Reduced redundant calls when dealing with forum excerpts

Sites Using This Plug-In:

• http://www.jeffsrecipes.com
• http://www.xboxcircle.com
• http://www.detailuniversity.com
• http://www.zeropaid.com
• http://www.daggersden.net/
• http://www.talkbronx.com/
• http://www.czeta.it
• http://www.boonvilleforum.com

(PM me if you want to add your site here)

Special Thanks:

axisoverdrive - Debugging Help, Kyraal - Paypal Donation, Kalina - Paypal Donation, Wildcard27 - Paypal Donation, Shri - Paypal Donation, pspcrazy - Paypal Donation, Tomahoochi - Paypal Donation.

If you use this plug-in, and find it useful, please support us by nominating us for Mod Of The Month (MOTM) in the top right corner of this thread, or feel free to donate.

If you do install:

Please Click Install

Brought To You By: Lampwrights.com.

[peleh]

Originally Posted by fmckinnon

OK - I'm thinking this may not work out - we're using the Role Manager plugin, and multiple contributors (users) in WP have different roles, etc.

So ....

Let me move on to this ...

Is it possible to do this:
1) auto-post the new wordpress articles in the respective vbulletin forums
2) use vbulletin for comments

but NOT use the user-sharing bridge?

So, really - sharing users really isn't a big deal to us - as much as using vbulletin for the comments on the blog side, and for making the blogs go over into vbulletin automatically.

Thanks in advance - for now, you can totally disregard my previous questions, and just answer this one.

I guess mapping the users via bridge is only needed if you need the vb-users to post on your blog, you can try to run this mod with Auto Integration OFF, dont know how this will work for you though.

For me here, the best way of using this mod was getting rid of all WP users and authors, and mapping the new vb-authors to make blog posts, i guess this would be really hard if you already have a big wordpress site with lots of posts and contributors...

[fmckinnon]

peleh,
thanks - I'll give it a try. The reason I can't do the second thing you suggested (great idea) is because not all vbulletin users are allowed to be contributors on the blog - only a select few are. We use the "Role Management" plugin in WordPress - and those who have "contributor" privileges in WordPress can login to WordPress and submit articles; however, they go into "pending publish" so our editor can review and edit them before taking them live.

When auto-mapping is turned on, ANY vbulletin user can then post a blog (article) immediately without any moderation. (NOT a good idea) ... unless I'm misunderstanding something.

[peleh]

Originally Posted by fmckinnon

peleh,
thanks - I'll give it a try. The reason I can't do the second thing you suggested (great idea) is because not all vbulletin users are allowed to be contributors on the blog - only a select few are. We use the "Role Management" plugin in WordPress - and those who have "contributor" privileges in WordPress can login to WordPress and submit articles; however, they go into "pending publish" so our editor can review and edit them before taking them live.

When auto-mapping is turned on, ANY vbulletin user can then post a blog (article) immediately without any moderation. (NOT a good idea) ... unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Well, you have to make a custom group inside vBulletin, and assign the users you want to that group, so you just map the custom group from vB to WP. The regular users from your forum should be mapped as registered.

For example, all my staff here are Authors, so i mapped only staff to be authors, and thats it, they have access to WP posting.

PS: When mapping, try to always select "Do not map" for groups that you do not want to map, doing this i guess you maybe prevent some mapping bugs to happen... :P

[fmckinnon]

Gotcha -
That makes sense. Well, here's what I have so far ... I turned off the auto-map, and I *DID* successfully post over to the forums via WordPress (hooray!). However, there is a good bit of HTML formatting in my WordPress post, and since my Vbulletin forum had HTML option turned OFF, it didn't render properly.

So, I deleted the thread, and changed the forum permissions to allow HTML.

I went into WordPress, saved the post as a draft/unbpublished, and then re-published it again, hoping it would re-post to the forum, but no luck.

Somehow, somewhere, either wordpress, vbulletin, or the bridge is remembering that you've already posted that wordpress post to the forums, and if you've deleted the thread from vbulletin, it won't re-add it again if you re-publish via WordPress ...

Does anyone know a work-around on that - or how can I make it repost to vbulletin again?

The bridge is working, because a NEW wordpress post works fine - and even the old ones, that are already in there, if I save as draft and then re-publish, they post to the forums .. .but if you delete the thread in vbulletin, and try it again - it won't double-post.

[fmckinnon]

UPDATE: OK, I have it working now - without mapping users.

Now, the only problem I have is this - I originally setup the vbridge settings to use my forum ID #1 "twc_admin" ... I've changed it to a new user (#2395) TheWorshipCommunity.Com and saved the changes; however, when I post new content in Wordpress, it still comes across in the forums under userID #1 (twc_admin) ...

I've verified the changes - what do I need to do so that the wordpress articles now post under the correct userID in vbulletin? Maybe disabling and re-enabling the plugin?

[peleh]

You dont have to delete the topic, just unpublish it, the topic will disappear, when you save, everything on the topic will be saved also, but i dont know how this will work if you have auto-integrate turned off.

Another thing, its unsafe to allow users to post html on vbulletim, with that, they can totally screw up the topic with html commands, like background color, and so on.

[peleh]

Originally Posted by fmckinnon

UPDATE: OK, I have it working now - without mapping users.

Now, the only problem I have is this - I originally setup the vbridge settings to use my forum ID #1 "twc_admin" ... I've changed it to a new user (#2395) TheWorshipCommunity.Com and saved the changes; however, when I post new content in Wordpress, it still comes across in the forums under userID #1 (twc_admin) ...

I've verified the changes - what do I need to do so that the wordpress articles now post under the correct userID in vbulletin? Maybe disabling and re-enabling the plugin?

Maybe because when you are the editor, wordpress is aways overwriting the author when you post, check the bottom of the posting page, if that is your case, the solution i found for me is by removing all the author selection code inside the posting page, you can see from the partial solution on my post on the previous page of this topic.

[fmckinnon]

hey - thanks so much.

A little explanation - I was deleting the threads in vbulletin, not the actual posts in wordpress. I deleted them after doing a test post (which put a test post in the forum), etc ...

Regarding HTML - I tend to agree, which is why I had it turned OFF - however, that almost negates the purpose of the plugin posting into the forum - I can't imagine there are many wordpress posts that don't contain some HTML formatting (ie. graphics or links) ... and it really made the forum post look junky with all the HTML code in the forum post not parsing ...

Regarding the other issue - I've tried changing the authorship in wordpress (in the bottom of the write post window) to any number of various authors - regardless of what is chosen in that menu, it always posts into the forum as my userID #1 - though I've already changed that in the vbridge settings.

I'll keep trying.

REGARDING THE HTML: if it's best to keep HTML turned OFF in the forums, how then do you advise handling the HTML tags that are in the WordPress posts?

[peleh]

Hmm, on my installation here, images, text and links go just fine even with html turned off on vbulletin.

What i do here, when some code go trought and apears on the forum, like nextgen gallery, i edit the post. When i try to pass embed code, like videos, i edit with the format that vbulletin accept, wich is a link to the video.

[MrFab]

hello there !

thanks for this mod, so great... BUT i have a problem : I've done everything (I think so...) but when I turn on the integration, I can't login anymore to Wordpress. It seems Wordpress goes to the VB database (it doesn't recognize the "admin" login of WP), I log in with my VB admin login (Fab) and it redirects to a blank page (login.php), without setting any session :/

Do you know where it comes from ?

(sorry for my poor english )