Regular readers will know about my SammyNetbook site which has enjoyed some reasonable success and has established itself as the top English language Samsung Netbook community site on the net.
Like most of you reading this you’ll probably also enjoy the continual expansion and quest for new challenges and so I’ve decided to have a go at creating a new site – this time not using e107, yikes!
As much as I like e107, SammyNetbook doesn’t really use many of its features. I only post to the news and the forum and most users tend to look at either one or the other.
So actually I could just use WordPress and PhpBB3 to run my site. I think most people will agree that these two individual components are superior to the individual components of e107. Of course they can’t replace a full on CMS – but I don’t need all the features so that’s not a problem.
I also thought it would be cool to add a Wiki. I’d like the site to be as “community” orientated as possible so a Wiki is a great way to allow people to contribute. Wikipedia can be opened up quite easily too for other posters. Of course as a cautious person I will only be allowing trusted users, as proven on the forum, to have extra rights.
So how did I integrate WordPress PHPBB3 and MediWiki?
First off I linked MediaWiki to the forum using this modification.
And then to link WP and PHPBB3 I used the WP-UNITED mod, an updated version is here.
Plan B
Unfortunately WP-United didn’t do exactly what I wanted. All I was after was a system to provide basic login integration but this plugin is much more advanced. You need this if you want to allow all of your phpBB users their own “blog”. This was way beyond what I needed!
So plan B. It then occurred to me that I could integrate e107, MediaWiki and phpBB together. And in my next post I will cover how I did this. Not only wa it much easier but it turned out to be a much more powerful solution.
