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Posts tagged phpBB

WP-United integration for WordPress and phpBB

WP-United appears to break blogs when you update to WP 2.5.+. Just a note.

WP 2.3 theme released for tags, phpBB2 integration via WP-United plugin

WARNING: Appears to break in WP 2.5.

I’ve just completed the Bipolar theme you can see in use here.

The theme is quite lean, boasting some great features:

1. The theme supports tags, new to WordPress 2.3.
2. Title tags are SEO optimized, so you won’t need a plugin to do the job.
3. The theme is widget-ready.
4. It’s ready to nest a phpBB2 forum within the blog via the WP-United mod for phpBB (optional).

The last one is a big one, because most themes need some major tweaking to get the forum to look halfway decent. I spent a couple of days getting WP-United running then designing a theme that looks good with phpBB’s subsilver template and thought, what the heck, I’ll make it public.

This theme will NOT work on WordPress versions prior to 2.3 without revisions.

Here is a screen shot:

Other points of interest:

• The forum.php template is included for your forum page. I recommend you use it instead of the default page.php for the forum (if you have one).
• The theme is CMS ready — if you create a page named “home” using the default page template, you can make a page named “blog” or “posts” or whatever using the included blog.php page template, which mimics the index.php. Then all you need to do is go to “options” and “reading” in your admin section, and set up your static front page. You’re ready to go.
• To set up WP-United in a way that would work so that I could keep WordPress in the root directory, I had to rename the WP index.php (in the WP root, not the file by the same name in the theme directory) to index-old.php, then rename the blog file included with WP-United to index.php. In the latter file, I had to type in the path to my phpBB installation. I used the absolute path: ‘forum’ — it was maddening getting it going, but armed with this knowledge it should take you no time. This was the only workaround I could figure out for the trailing slash that kept appearing, causing a White Screen of Death.
• With this theme, you can select “full page” in the WP-United setup in your phpBB admin (once you install the mod). You won’t need to change the style sheet. But it does slow things down. I like how it looks with the sidebar, but it’s your call.

The XHTML validates on your WordPress pages. Note that the XHTML does not validate on your forum pages.

Of course I can’t make you do it, but I ask that you keep the links in the footer — they’re for a good cause.

To install this theme, first download it (zip or tar version), then unzip the whole folder, uploading it into the “themes” folder inside “wp-content,” found in your WordPress root directory. Select the theme from “presentation” in your blog’s admin area.

To make this theme work with WP-United, you will first need to have both WP 2.3 and phpBB installed. Then you will need the WP-United mod for phpBB installed (I recommend using the ‘easymod’ mod to do it). Please note that I have just told you everything I know about making WP-United work, so please use the WP-United documentation, forum, or support for further help and information.