WordPress Forum User Integration

[Austin Matzko]

I’m trying to integrate a basic forum into a WordPress CMS setup. I’ve searched the forums and the web at large, and usually what I find is something too basic, such as instructions on how to make their templates look the same.

Instead of help creating templates, I need help integrating the user tables of WordPress and whatever forum software. By “integrate,” I mean that when someone logs into WordPress, she also can make forum posts, etc., without having to log in again.

I’ve looked at doing this with PHPBB, for example, and given up, for this reason: instead of using a set of common functions to make user changes and the like, PHPBB basically makes direct MySQL queries spread throughout its code. In fact, there are over 100 such queries regarding the PHPBB user table. To make PHPBB users integrate with WordPress would involve some pretty serious hacking of PHPBB.

So has anybody had any success integrating an open-source forum application with the WordPress users?

[masquerade]

https://bbpress.org

From much of the team that brings you WordPress comes a forum where changing one line will integrate the user tables.

[dougyitbos]

Very impressive!
… but which line of code.

I see requests like “Great… but HOW?” on the bbpress.org and no answers.

Would love to give this a try if you can share how to integrate the userbase.

[Kafkaesqui]

Integrating bbPress is still more of a manual task for the site admin. If you need a simpler solution (that is, one which works seamlessly with WordPress), check out the XDForum plugin:

https://www.xdweb.net/wordpress/?page_id=5

[Aaron]

Integrating bbPress is pretty easy, to share the users table open up the bb-config.php file and after
$bb->gmt_offset = -5;

add

// use the WP user table for your bbpress user list
define('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE', 'wp_users');

if you want to use wp themes, functions etc, just make sure that bbpress calls the wp-config file and you are good to go.
If you want check out this post on the bbpress dev mailing list, it goes into integrating wp-config, and a few other goodies right into the bb-config file.
https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/bbdev/2005-December/000452.html

Developing themes and tweaking this forum is easy.

[dougyitbos]

Thanks ergate!
I also found the following helpful:

https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/bbdev/2005-August/000227.html

[joan]

I would really like to integrate IPB (Invision Power Board) with WordPress eventually and have searched for info similar to the above to do so. Does anyone know of any? If they did I’d be forever grateful. ??

I’ll take a look at bbPress in the meantime. Thanks for the above info!