I’ve taken some time to learn a little bit about “the Loop” in WordPress and setup a page specific to my latest blog entries. Now I can keep the front page of my site to list only the news posts. I’ll finish adjusting the code and layout as I work on my website’s template.
It’s setup to use the same URL that my blog was setup to use ages ago:
http://www.elorg.net/journal/
Between school work and random house chores like weeding the garden (not to mention the day job) I’ve been getting an offline development instance of my website setup. I have the VM guest finally configured and ready, the database imported, and the files copied over. Now to just tweak the settings a little so that it will run locally and not think that it’s running on the live web server!
I don’t know how much longer I can take these “default” templates. hahaha
My site will most likely remain pretty ugly for a while. I’m focusing on getting everything actually working the way that I want it to first. Then I’ll come back and focus on customizing the layout and elorg-ifying it.
I’ve setup a login form on the home page. I kind of hacked it together, but it works. At least it contains the links to your WordPress & Vanilla profiles, as well as the forum for now. I’ll work on cleaning it up and setting some conditions when I have time.
I really need to setup my site to display excerpts of my posts instead of the entire thing…
If you’ve googled “WordPress Vanilla integration” then I’m sure you’ve come across the instructions on the Lussumo website. Thanks to them for taking some time to write that up! Unfortunately, that is no longer sufficient because it documents integrating WordPress 2.0.4 and Vanilla 1.0.1. At the time of writing this entry, WordPress is at 2.5.1 and Vanilla is at 1.1.4. In addition, every tutorial or bit of info that I’ve found has made the assumption that everything is starting out fresh and new. That makes it almost easy as cake! However, that doesn’t entirely work for me since I already had both WordPress and Vanilla installed, with users and content - functioning independently.
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If you’ve stopped by my site at all over the past couple of weeks and found my site in various stages of disarray, I apologize. I was in the middle of migrating to a new web server when I realized I had been hacked, so I bumped up my plans to switch over instead of taking my time. Meanwhile I was trying to integrate my forum and my blog - and they weren’t playing nice.
I’ve reinstalled WordPress and Vanilla … several dozens of times (I’ve lost count at this point). I’ve come across a number of different problems due to the dns update, trying to make things more secure, the phase of the moon, etc. I’m working on writing up a more thorough how-to - and it will be very long. Keep an eye out for that.
Meanwhile, I have most of the data imported. I’m working on finishing it up (while continuously testing the forum). Plugins/extensions come next, followed lastly by templating the site to make it look better… So I apologize for the ugliness.
It’s working! I figured out what was causing the problem (though, not yet why it was causing the problem).
Now you can login to wordpress here and then continue on to the forum here. I haven’t updated the vanilla login page, so that won’t work right now. You’ll need to login through wordpress for the time being. I also haven’t yet enabled new registrations. If you previously had an account you can post comments on my blog posts as well as comments in the forum.
I’m working on writing up some more detailed instructions on integrating wordpress and vanilla. I hope to get that posted over the next couple of days.
Next up - I need to install the plugins, and work on making things look good. 
Thanks for your patience!
I’m going through each of my news & journal posts individually to set the category back and add tags. I also need to update the author while I’m at it. I was just going to try to automate it or do it an easier way using phpmyadmin, but I’m glad I’m taking the time to go through them all. I’ve found some old sql injections that I’m cleaning out while I’m at it. Thankfully I didn’t blog that often over the past few years so there aren’t too many to go through. 
Meanwhile, the forum is still non-functional. I still have to figure out the cookie-path issue, and now I’m having some other weirdness as a result of securing my wordpress install a bit. D’oh! Keep checking back. I hope to have the forum back working soon.
You may or may not have noticed that my blog and forum (and pretty much everything else for that matter) was “down” all weekend. My site was hacked on Friday afternoon pretty badly and it wasn’t worth the effort to try to spend all the time fixing things - especially since I was in the middle of migrating everything to a new server at my host.
If you didn’t notice the downtime over the weekend, you should at least see that at the moment my site is very… bland. Yes, I’m currently using the default themes and templates that came with the scripts for my journal and forum. Because of the hack, I accelerated the migration to the new server and didn’t have time to get everything setup the way that I want. It works, but it’s not pretty. Sorry guys!
Meanwhile, I made sure to get my data and forum users migrated over to the new server before flipping the switch. I was able to integrate Wordpress and Vanilla in the process, so if you have access to the forum, you can use that same account to post comments on my journal entries. When you login you’ll need to use the Wordpress login page (for now) - the Vanilla login page doesn’t seem to be taking the Wordpress integration too well. You can use your old login credentials - but I ask that you please change your account password as soon as possible. I will have more information on this on the forum when I have time to write it up.
UPDATE -
Oops! It looks like in the process of switching the domain over to the new server, I broke something with the cookies between Wordpress and Vanilla. I’m trying to fix it now. Try back later.