elorg.net

I really don’t know what to think these days. I’ve fought to get WordPress 2.5x integrated with Vanilla forums last year, and failed horribly. Although, I thought I had succeeded a number of times – only to have it somehow breakdown without any modifications.

Eventually I gave up and went to bbPress. I forget the reasoning, but for some reason I went with the alpha version. Perhaps it integrated more readily with the new version of WordPress? It works, but there are quirks.

I should actually say, it worked. I updated bbPress, and it appeared to work ok. However, now you can’t actually open any threads. Odd. So its’ a forum where you can only login and see what is there, but not open or reply to anything? How useful. hahahaha

Now that the forum is just about completely hosed (and I haven’t figured out why yet), along with the original quirks… I’m tempted to give the WordPress+Vanilla another try. Or, I was.

Then I went back to that original thread that is apparently still active. It looks like people have been recently attempting this with the current versions with even less luck than before…?

I’ll think about it. For now I just need to get my new design up and functional – and THEN consider major hackory on my forum. But until then, the forum may be unusable

As of today, the forum is back online.

Unfortunately, I gave up on migrating the old data over. There were too many discrepancies between Vanilla and bbPress database table structure and requirements. Renaming/rearranging the tables are easy enough, but I don’t have the experience or time to try to make work-arounds for the more complicated discrepancies that I found, and then hope that it doesn’t break anything. I did give it a try though.

We didn’t have any critical data on the forum, so I figured that it wouldn’t hurt too much to start from scratch. It has a very similar layout to previous incarnations, and the access has been restricted similarly as well.

I installed bbPress since it integrates with WordPress a lot easier and more dependably than Vanilla does.

Your old account will still work unless it was removed due to complete inactivity. You can login through WordPress here on my website’s front page, or directly via the forum – both access the same user information.

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.

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.