lunabyte

Clean, simple, effective.

Something that might help later on, to keep that ‘professional’ look:

Instead of hardcoding a date in the footer, use php to keep it up to date.

For example:

© 2005-<?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> My Site/Company

Which the above reproduces © 2005-2006 My Site/Company.
Now you have one less thing to remember to do.

Doing the above has saved a lot of time on my end, plus when the new year rolls around, your site is ready to go and your visitors/clients see that your site is current.

Yet another example of the power, flexibility, and greatness of WordPress. ??

Thought I’d post an update on this.

This process has been successful.

While there is still some cleanup to do, it’s working very well.

– The basics of it is that the Portal/Forum handles logins, and registrations once you install the plugin.

– If a user exists on the Portal/Forum (SMF) side, and they browse to the blog, it looks for the SMF cookie to be set. If it is, and they do not exist in the WordPress user table, it will automatically create an account for them, and log them in seamlessly.

– Admin’s will be able to do an initial sync of users in the WordPress users table, and add them into the Portal/SMF tables. There is a difference in the way WordPress hashes their passwords as opposed to SMF, but thanks to the SMF team for adding in a backwards compatibility check for their previous system, which just so happens to work great for rehashing WP passwords as a side benefit.

– If a user has an existing WordPress site, they can install the Portal/Forum Packages, then theme it to match their site. Existing SMF users that have been waiting for an integrated option will also be able to do the same.

Now, don’t freak out when you hear portal. The portal can be as little or as much as you would like. You can set it to handle all kinds of things, and if you’d rather have WordPress handle your site, you can simply turn off some features for the portal, and it will look like a standard forum. (For example, turning off all the portal ‘blocks’, etc.

We’ve tested out a lot of themes, and have yet to find one that absolutely didn’t work. Although, there may be a little css tweaking needed.

The way it is displayed in conjunction with WordPress will depend on how you theme the Portal/SMF. Most likely, you will need to do a little work with it, but we will also provide a few modified themes that will work seamlessly on initial installation.

Either way, this works great, and is a VERY simple installation.

Once we make the ‘official’ announcement and the plugin becomes available, I’ll post a link in this thread for anyone that would like to take a peek.

@ markjaquith:

Server Beach does have Debian. As well as RHEL, Cent, and another non-penguin friendly O$.

Thomas, you’re choices are endless, and it probably seems overwhelming.
Hang in there, you’ll find something that fits.

Best advice I can offer, find some places you think you could be comfortable with, then worry about the price. In the long run, you’ll get what you pay for.

I recommend Server Beach (add .com for their site).

I have several servers there for various projects, and they have been wonderful. ??

Well this certainly seems to be becoming a little bit of an underground uprising. ??

I’d love to say that I’m working on an SMF plugin, but I’m not. Well, not exactly.
I’m actually looking to integrate wordpress into another portal/cms environment, that just happens to use SMF for the forum.

Recently we used the SMF bridge in conjunction with a couple other files for a seamless integration of coppermine, and with the excellent theme system for WordPress I believe we can seamlessly integrate WordPress as well.

The only problem, comes back down to the user tables and sharing/using them between the two. I’m hoping to be able to either just use the current (non-WordPress) user table, or at least mirror them. I’m also hoping to not need to modify any WordPress files. However, the further I dig into this, the less likely it seems to be the case. Maybe being able to redefine the user variables or something in a my-hack.php file, or redefine them in a bridge file called from the theme index.php file.

If anyone has already experimented with integrating logins and users with a different database table, and can share their experience, that would be great.

I really would like to get this rolling. I’ve already got posts from the blog being pulled, that part was pretty easy (Thanks for: “The Loop”), but now comes the fun part. ??