WordPress & other CMS Systems

WordPress is a great CMS, no doubt about it.  But unfortunately, some of it’s core functionality is lacking, even when using every plugin known to man.  For instance, integrating a phpBB forum into WordPress is trying.  While WP-United solves that to some degree, it’s a one-man dev shop, and he’s been prone to take long breaks away.  His latest plugin (0.8.5) was released long before WP 3.0, and while it seems to work ok, still has some errors.

I’ve been struggling to integrate MediaWiki, phpBB3, and WordPress together.  Basically, WordPress is going to run the functionality of the overall site, including the template.  This is for my gaming community, and we’ve had phpBB and MediaWiki running together for quite some time.  Unfortunately, they’ve always run disjointedly, meaning there was never any real integration between the home page, the forums, and the wiki.

Sadly, Mediawiki won’t integrate with the WP-United setup.  It’s left me very frustrated the last few days.  The idea of adding a few lines of code that call up the WP header may work for WP & Mediawiki alone, but not with WP, Mediawiki, and WP-United.  Maybe phpBB4 will fix that, but that’s easily 12 months away.

The elegant solution, it seems, is to just use the idea of the integration instructions and use another Wiki package.  Seems I’ve found that solution with WikkaWiki, although it remains to be seen if I’ll be able to get the data inside our MediaWiki install and convert it to WikkaWiki.  I hope that I can.