Roman Forum

I finally figured out how to get my bbPress forum, visually, integrated into my WordPress site.  Feel free to drop in and call me names or something.

The forum itself integrates into the backend nicely since it is developed by the same people that made WordPress, but there is no way to integrate it into a WordPress theme without creating a matching theme by hand.  That is, unless that hand knows magic!

My magic is much less magical than others whom I’ve read have edited code to merge the two, but my method is much more simple.  If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that simple is good…and that I’m lazy, so simple is as good as it’s gonna get.

My method was to simply create a new page template based on my current theme’s page template.  I stripped out the post related code and replaced it with a simple iframe call to my forum.  I then created a new page within WordPress, left the content empty, pointed it to my newly created template, and violla, the css was wrong.  So I had to do a little tweaking to the css to get it just right, but overall I think it looks pretty good…or as I like to say, good enough.

Since it is just an iframe, it’s not perfect.  External links clicked inside the forum will cause the link to load inside the frame, and that just looks wierd, but thats too bad.

A book about faces

Excuse me while I am experimenting with some newfangled abilities to have my posts here show up on my Facebook page as notes and conversely have the comments posted to those notes sync back here.  It’s amazing what they can do with magic these days.

Assuming any of this even works. If it doesn’t, then I have lost all faith in magic and might have to turn to religion.

Next thing you know, myspace will suck less…

…and maybe I’m a chinese jet pilot.

Update: Either the Facebook rss reader has a fairly long refresh time or it just doesn’t work.  Hopefully it’s just slow else there seems to be little point in the feature.

Update: Post syncing = success. Comment syncing = fail.

Iron Man

Volume 7 of my often inactive website has gone live. This time around we’ll see how long I can go before this thing starts to collect dust again. I’m going to try and post here regularly…

The overall look is not finished, I need to “make it my own”, but the backend is up-to-date and functional. The old forum has been replaced with bbPress which integrates nicely into WordPress since it was created by the same group. Sadly, none of the old user accounts or posts were able to be migrated, so those will have to start from scratch.