WordBB 0.1 Beta Released
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “I thought the last release of this was 0.9 alpha or something!”.
In fact you’re right. Fact is, I decided to completely drop the old code base, and start everything from scratch. The reason is that I wasn’t happy with the old code at all; also, as you may know, it had been like two years since the last time I worked on that, so what happened is that I completely forgot about how it worked.
So in the end, I decided to start from an empty PHP file (occasionally copy and pasting some snippets), hence the apparently weird version number.
Another reason why I decided all this is that I was unhappy with how I used to approach things with the old plugin. I think I’ve grown as a PHP programmer (I’m not exactly a guru, though!) in all this time I disappeared, so things should definitely work better than the previous releases, be it in terms of speed or reliability.
So, what about the features?
Okay, let’s talk about this new release. First of all, as you can guess from the post title, it’s still in a beta stage, mainly because as far as I can test it, I’ll still need to receive some feedback by people, so that I know what others think about the plugin’s usability and reliability over various software/server configurations.
As for the features, the bad news first: I’ve decided to partly drop the user merge feature. “Partly”, because you actually can create a bridge between a WordPress profile and a MyBB user, but you’ll still have to login in both the platforms to use them. What sounds useful about this feature, is that if you link WP user “FooWP” to MyBB user “FooMyBB”, all WP posts by “FooWP” will be duplicated as MyBB threads by “FooMyBB”. So this feature makes sense if you have more than an author on your WordPress blog and want to create a thread on MyBB for each blog post using the correct author.
Other than this, I don’t think that a real “user merging” feature will ever be possible: WordPress and MyBB use different ways of handling registrations, and, on top of that, they have different ways of handling passwords. An example of the problems I found when trying to implement this: if you register on a WordPress blog, you can enter a 1-character long password, but on MyBB you can’t (the system will return an error). Also, what about linking existing accounts? They will obviously have different passwords.
Apart from all the technical reasons, I just found out that not a lot of people are asking for this feature. Somebody even explicitly told it’s completely worthless, and I’ve got to admit that I’d agree with that. I mean, what’s the point of merging WordPress and MyBB accounts? From my point of view there isn’t one. Keep reading to find out why.
The ideal WordBB scenario
When I think about a WordPress blog linked to a MyBB message board through WordBB, this is the ideal scenario that comes to my mind: on the blog you have all your news, published by one or more authors. Each blog post has a corresponding thread on the forums, and users, which are MyBB accounts, can use those threads to comment the WP articles. So, basically, you’re using MyBB as a comment system, instead of the one included in WordPress — all the “comments” links are replaced with links to MyBB threads.
This is how WordBB is supposed to be used from my point of view. If you have other scenarios in mind, just post your ideas here.
Some brand new stuff
Apart from the stuff already seen in the previous versions, such as posts duplication and the new user link thing I mentioned above, WordBB 0.1 has some new things. You’ll now be able to “bridge” WP categories with MyBB forums, so that if you bridge “TechnologyWP” with “TechnologyMyBB”, when you’ll publish a new article under “TechnologyWP”, it will get duplicated on “TechnologyMyBB” on the forums for your users to comment to.
Also, you’ll be able not only to replace all WP “comments” links with links to corresponding MyBB threads, but it’s possible to display MyBB posts as WordPress comments as well.
Furthermore, a new set of template tags to better integrate your WordPress site with the forum, such as the following:
- wordbb_get_username(): returns the username for the MyBB user currently logged in.
- wordbb_get_avatar(): returns the avatar link for the MyBB user currently logged in.
- wordbb_get_pms(): returns an object with the personal messages of the MyBB user currently logged in.
…and so on. You can find all of them in the readme file and in the documentation.
Another cool feature is a WordPress sidebar widget that displays the latest discussions from your MyBB board. You can set the maximum number of entries, exclude specific forum categories, and choose whether to show posts or threads.
As a side note, this release features the WordPress side of the plugin only. Also, unlike it was for the previous versions, the two sides are now completely independent from each other, so you don’t have to install both the WordPress plugin and the MyBB plugin anymore.
WordPress and MyBB can reside on different databases (you can specify MyBB database data in the plugin’s settings).
Download
You can find the download for this release on the WordBB project page.
How to support this project
As usual, you’re more than welcome to post your problems you experience using this release, and, if you have new ideas, constructive criticism and so on, just let me know. Also, you can buy me a pizza using the Donation form on the homepage or the button below. Thanks!
your thread reminds me of the wise quote – \”Character is destiny.\” (Heraclitus) – great job, keep it up!
OMG this project is alive again xD i’m so glad… thx
Congratulations. This is good news for users of MyBB. Long time expected.
Have a good work.
This is very good news
Can I see Demo ?
Setup your own, it takes two mins.
Would give it a try on localhost and post your a feedback soon.
But really a great plugin effort made. I hope it develops to much more than just few functions.
Some areas to look on to :
- Blogs comments and the corresponding thread replies.
- The alignment and thread customization .
Anyways there are a few more things in my mind, would first try the plugin and then reply back.
Thanks for a nice plugin.
GodSpeed!
Thank you so much for this awesome plugin, thats almost exactly what I need!
Is this blog post for bug reports/feature requests, too?
If yes I’ve got the following problem so far:
If a publish a new blog post it appears in the forum like it should be. But if I then comment this blog post I get an 404 because the address is wrong. I think this might be because I use the plugin “Google SEO” which changes the URI.
The comment actually does appear but it’s a ordinary wordpress comment which has nothing to do with MyBB and the MyBB user account.
Is there a way to solve this problem?
Regards,
Nico
@FL4PJ4CK: If you are using MyBB as your comment system, you should not use the WordPress comment form. You should hide it if the current post has a corresponding MyBB thread (you can check this using wordbb_get_thread_id()) (by the way, I just wrote about this in the documentation).
Oh ok, I thought that this plugin also allows the user to use the comment form of wordpress to transfer the comment to MyBB.
But if that’s not possible – OK. Nevertheless it works good.
Another question: What do I have to do that the user name is a link to its profile? It’s just a normal text so far.
Thanks, Nico
I just added this feature. New version is 0.1.5 Beta.
Hi, i have a problem with your pligin, de wordpress says
WordBB errors — “Configuration is not complete. Go to WordBB Options”
* MyBB global.php file not found. Check your MyBB root folder path!
Please help me….
Thanks my friend.
The MyBB path you have entered is wrong. To see what’s the right path, just put a php file in your MyBB folder with the following text:
and run the script.
how run the script ?
I create archive… Name: folder.php, and code is….
Documento sin título
}
how can run de script?
thanks
hi Hangman,
Thanks for your work,WordBB is great.
i have a prob. though,
Mybb posts can’t recognize wp tags.
You can see here: http://forum.oyunju.com/showthread.php?tid=7
is there any way to figure out this problem?
thanks in advance.
@rbl: the problem is not related to WordBB itself, since what it does is simply copying post contents. Anyway, a possible solution could be adding a custom “caption” MyCode tag on your MyBB board. Go in your admin panel, then Configuration, MyCode and click Add New MyCode.
As a regular expression, try this:
as a replacement, try this:
Of course you will have to add the CSS blocks for wp-caption and wp-caption-text in your board theme’s stylesheet. Let me know if it works for you; if so I’ll add these snippets in the documentation. Thanks!
Thanks Hangman it worked!
now there are just and probs.
http://forum.oyunju.com/showthread.php?tid=10
can u write mycode for these too?
thanks!
edit to above:
now there are just img and a href problems.
Well, to solve that, you just have to enable HTML for that section. As an alternative, you could try a WordPress bbCode plugin and use [img] tags in your WP posts — MyBB will read those.
Thank you Hangman, really appreciated.
you have a guide for install this plugin?
@Hangman: Wow that’s awesome. I’ll try this in the next days. Thanks!
Hello Hangman,
Congrats for an excellent plugin.
I have a problem. version 0.1.6
“WordBB errors — “Configuration is not complete. Go to WordBB Options”
* Default post forum field empty
* Default post author field empty”
There is no option for Default post forum, since its saying
Default post forum (not available). What went wrong please? and…these fields must be filled with numbers or actual names.
Thanks for your help.
Hello
I have asked this on your myBB thread but I will ask you here:
I’m using myBB software over a year now, and I plan to redesign my forum in a few months from now, give it some extra features etc. And I have an idea, and I’m not sure if it’s possible to create it.
Beside my forum I also have a blog on the same domain but on the folder “/blog”, powered by WordPress. I would like to connect my forum and blog in a way that, for example, my last 3 blog posts would show up below my forum header in a form of picture+text… and below it would be my forum (categories, forums). Is that possible to do? Could it be done with this plugin? Or could this plugin be modified to do that?
Thanx
hi Hangman,
i have same problem as daniel, i put a php file in myBB forder with the code , but when i run it, there only this code in the screen? can you help me?
i had my MyBB path, but it’s still not work!
Hi I just installed this new at http://morewillberevealed.net/community and both are installed new it says it can’t find my global and this what happened before so I just went with something else. However I would really like to make this work with the MyBB any suggestions or hacks I am not much into this sorry.
Vic
I install your plugin and it installed fine but if i go to wp-admin then to users i get a 500 error id i deactivate plugin it works again can this be fixed
I guess it’s related to your hosting. Try setting permissions for the plugin’s folder and all the files to 755.
WordBB errors — “Configuration is not complete. Go to WordBB Options”
* MyBB global.php file not found. Check your MyBB root folder path!
Please help me
Since I have been asked this question a lot, I’ve added the answer to the documentation page. Please refer to it. Have fun!
Hey, I’m trying to use the template tags, but not all of them seem to work for me, here’s the list from the wordpress page (Plain text)
Username:
Avatar: http://localhost/TAS2.0/forum/
PM’s: Array
Last visit:
FLast visit: Today, 11:44 PM
Logout Key:
Logout URL:
Any chance of some ‘examples’ ?
@AtticShow: I answered here: http://valadilene.org/2010/06/27/wordbb-0-3-released/#comments