[Plugin: WPSMF – WordPress to SMF] Small list of WPSMF issues

First of all, thanks for the plugin! It saves us duplicate work of posting the same information on our WordPress home page, with a matching entry in the forum for folks to respond to. This will be a killer plugin!

Now, a short list of items that may be related to settings I’m missing, or maybe something that could be tweaked in the code in future updates.

1. There is a lot of HTML formatting ending up in the SMF post. If there is no way to send it as BBCode over to SMF, it might be easier to give us an option to send only plain text posts over to SMF. We can easily add any formatting there that we need.

2. I know this is by design, but having an option to NOT send post edits over to SMF would be helpful. I made a post, got it looking nice in WordPress, then hopped over to SMF to clean it up (remove all HTML tags, reformat, etc.). I found a spelling error, edited my post, then found SMF’s version needed cleaning up again. Just sending over the original post would be good enough for us, but I don’t know how hard that is to implement.

3. When I use the ” (quotation) mark in a WP post title, I only get the escape character (backslash) in the SMF title, with no more text after it. I realize it could be a PHP addslashes()/stripslashes() or mysql_escape_string() issue.

4. When I map WP categories to SMF forum areas, the settings I make sometimes do not “stick”. In one test post I made, the WP posted ended up in the correct forum area. If I look at my WPSMF settings, I had originally filled all of the boxes in, but some ended up with empty forum IDs. They are all valid forum IDs, so that’s not the problem. I’m not sure if they are getting saved in the database, but I can take a look–it could just be a simple display issue in the WPSMF settings.

5. What, exactly, do I use in the “SMF Link Text” field? The sample text is: “Follow on our forum“. Does this magically rewrite so that the URL to the post is provided so users can hop over to SMF to read the thread in the forum? Or does it end up being a generic link to the forum home page? I don’t plan on using the comments feature–I would prefer discussion go right into the thread. (That’s where the majority of members will spend their time anyway…the WP home page is just there as a recruiting tool and informational page, basically.)

6. Although I’m not using commenting, I temporarily turned it on for the post and made a test comment. It showed up in the SMF thread, but was attributed to “guest”, with my WP “nickname” showing. Somehow the user ID is not being carried into the comment system.

I’m also now wondering if I’d be better off with an SMF portal page rather than WordPress, but I really DO prefer WordPress since it has so many helpful plugins (and some that work with my affiliate links).

Thanks for the plugin!