phpbb_recent_topics version 0.4.1

UPDATE: This Plugin has been updated, please download the update from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/phpbb-recent-topics/, and please comment on the new post, thanks.

This is a small update, it incorporates the patch submitted by toni to fix the widget, thanks toni

The old information still applies…

phpBB Recent Topics Admin interface in WordPress

Admin GUI

If you’re happy with v0.4 and have it running fine then don’t bother, in fact edit phpbb_recent_topics.php so that WordPress stops complaining about finding a newer version.

Download phpBB_Recent_Topics_0.4.1 from wordpress.org

What’s New?

The widget patch mentioned above!

What’s Old?

Most importantly I have tested this plugin with phpBB3 and WP2.5 so I’ve updated the readme.txt to reflect this.
I finally quashed the install bug where by phpbb-recent-topics was confused with phpbb_recent_topics.
Sidebar Widget, yus for all you non-php people you have a widget to play with.
Edit the Time & Date layout – leave blank to remove it completely

The Installation

Unzip phpbb_recent_topics.tgz in your `/wp-content/plugins/` directory. (You’ll have a new directory, with this plugin in /wp-content/plugins/phpbb_recent_topics)
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Configure the plugin, you need to tell wordpress about phpbb, this is done in the wordpress menu ‘Settings’ -> ‘phpBB Recent Topics’
The following Settings are required:
- * The name of your phpBB database (e.g phpbb)
- * The name of the table where topics are held (the default is phpbb_topics )
- * The full url of your forum for links (e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/forum)
- * The number of topics to show. (If left blank you get 5)
- * The Date Formatting, i.e. “d/M/y – g:i a” similar to the WordPress “General Settings”
Hit ‘Update Options”
To output the list of topics in a page or post…
- * create a new page/post, type {phpbb_recent_topics} , hit ‘Publish’ or ‘Create new page’
To output the list of topics in your theme sidebar using the widget…
- * click “design” in the dashboard
- * click “widgets”
- * next to phpBB Recent Topics click “add”
- * click “save changes”
To output the list of topics in your theme sidebar using a template tag…
- * edit sidebar.php and inside <div id=”sidebar”> type…
```
<?php
if (function_exists('phpbb_topics')) {
phpbb_topics();
}
?>
```

A bit about Database configuration.
If wordpress & phpBB share a DB already then set $PHPBBDB to DB_NAME and everything will be fine, else you’re going to need to GRANT the wordpress user read access to phpBB.

How to GRANT wordpress read only access to phpBB ?
If you don’t know it already you need to find your wordpress mysql user id, it’ll be in wp-config.php

define('DB_USER', 'wp_user');     // Your MySQL username

and you should have already found your phpbb database & table for the above.
You need to type the following syntax into your mysql database

GRANT SELECT ON phpbb_database.phpbb_topics TO wp_user@localhost;

this can be achieved by logging into phpmyadmin as your phpbb user, selecting SQL and pasting the correct GRANT into the text box.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is phpbb3 supported?
- yes.
Can I output 10 Topics in my Page, and 3 Topics in my Sidebar ?
- Yes ! In the WordPress menu ‘Options’ -> ‘phpBB Recent Topics’, set ‘The number of topics to show’ to 10, and then in your sidebar include…<?php
  if (function_exists(‘phpbb_topics’)) {
  phpbb_topics(3);
  }
  ?>
Can I exclude a certain forum from the list ?
- In this version, the only way to do that is to hack /wp-content/plugins/phpbb_recent_topics/display/display.php, change
```
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $TOPIC_TABLE ORDER BY topic_time DESC LIMIT $LIMIT");
```
  to
```
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $TOPIC_TABLE WHERE forum_id != 1 ORDER BY topic_time DESC LIMIT $LIMIT");
```
  to exclude forum 1 from the list. I plan to setup a proper solution to this in the next version.
Why is the date config under settings not in the widget configuration?
- The date settings effect both the template tag and the widget

Support
I’ve always been honest about support, there isn’t any. Basically I write this for my own needs and then publish it for you to use for free. You’re more than welcome to post comments here and if you tag wordpress forum posts with “phpbb-recent-topics” I’ll reply to you there, but we all have busy lives and I make no promises on how quickly I’ll reply to you.

Link for posting in the correct phpbb-recent-topics forum

Finally Subversion
You also might be interested to know that I’ve been getting to grips with the wordpress plug-ins svn, so you can get work directly from here; and when wordpress.org re-crawls my readme the latest version will also be available on wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Recent phpBB Topics on WordPress Plugin v0.4

UPDATE: This Plugin has been updated, please download the update from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/phpbb-recent-topics/, and please comment on the new post, thanks.

Admin GUI

It’s been a year since the last release so perhaps this version should be called “about time!” v0.4 has primarily been released as a bugfix version, if you’re happy with v0.3 and have it running fine then don’t bother, in fact edit phpbb_recent_topics.php so that WordPress stops complaining about finding a newer version.

Download phpBB_Recent_Topics_0.4 from wordpress.org

What’s New?

Most importantly I have tested this plugin with phpBB3 and WP2.5 so I’ve updated the readme.txt to reflect this.
I finally quashed the install bug where by phpbb-recent-topics was confused with phpbb_recent_topics.
Sidebar Widget, yus for all you non-php people you have a widget to play with.
Edit the Time & Date layout – leave blank to remove it completely

What’s Old? – aka: Installation

Unzip phpbb_recent_topics.tgz in your `/wp-content/plugins/` directory. (You’ll have a new directory, with this plugin in /wp-content/plugins/phpbb_recent_topics)
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Configure the plugin, you need to tell wordpress about phpbb, this is done in the wordpress menu ‘Settings’ -> ‘phpBB Recent Topics’
The following Settings are required:
- * The name of your phpBB database (e.g phpbb)
- * The name of the table where topics are held (the default is phpbb_topics )
- * The full url of your forum for links (e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/forum)
- * The number of topics to show. (If left blank you get 5)
- * The Date Formatting, i.e. “d/M/y – g:i a” similar to the WordPress “General Settings”
Hit ‘Update Options”
To output the list of topics in a page or post…
- * create a new page/post, type {phpbb_recent_topics} , hit ‘Publish’ or ‘Create new page’
To output the list of topics in your theme sidebar using the widget…
- * click “design” in the dashboard
- * click “widgets”
- * next to phpBB Recent Topics click “add”
- * click “save changes”
To output the list of topics in your theme sidebar using a template tag…
- * edit sidebar.php and inside <div id=”sidebar”> type…
```
<?php
if (function_exists('phpbb_topics')) {
phpbb_topics();
}
?>
```

How to GRANT wordpress read only access to phpBB ?
If you don’t know it already you need to find your wordpress mysql user id, it’ll be in wp-config.php

define('DB_USER', 'wp_user');     // Your MySQL username

and you should have already found your phpbb database & table for the above.
You need to type the following syntax into your mysql database

GRANT SELECT ON phpbb_database.phpbb_topics TO wp_user@localhost;

this can be achieved by logging into phpmyadmin as your phpbb user, selecting SQL and pasting the correct GRANT into the text box.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is phpbb3 supported?
- yes.
Can I output 10 Topics in my Page, and 3 Topics in my Sidebar ?
- Yes ! In the WordPress menu ‘Options’ -> ‘phpBB Recent Topics’, set ‘The number of topics to show’ to 10, and then in your sidebar include…<?php
  if (function_exists(‘phpbb_topics’)) {
  phpbb_topics(3);
  }
  ?>
Can I exclude a certain forum from the list ?
- In this version, the only way to do that is to hack /wp-content/plugins/phpbb_recent_topics/display/display.php, change
```
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $TOPIC_TABLE ORDER BY topic_time DESC LIMIT $LIMIT");
```
  to
```
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $TOPIC_TABLE WHERE forum_id != 1 ORDER BY topic_time DESC LIMIT $LIMIT");
```
  to exclude forum 1 from the list. I plan to setup a proper solution to this in the next version.
Why is the date config under settings not in the widget configuration?
- The date settings effect both the template tag and the widget

EDIT: Found a link for posting in the correct phpbb-recent-topics forum

Call to undefined function: register_sidebar_widget

So WP2.5 is out, and I figured it was about time I squashed that load bug on phpbb_recent_topics, while I’m at it I figure I’ll wigetize it.

The problem is that the example on the automattic site doesn’t actually work! If you paste…

function widget_myuniquewidget($args) {
    extract($args);
?>
        <?php echo $before_widget; ?>
            <?php echo $before_title
                . 'My Unique Widget'
                . $after_title; ?>
            Hello, World!
        <?php echo $after_widget; ?>
<?php
}
register_sidebar_widget('My Unique Widget','widget_myuniquewidget');

Into a blank plugin you get this in your logs…

PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function:  register_sidebar_widget()

Now I’ve not been bothered to dig out the exact reason why yet, something to do with the sidebar loading, but you need to wrap the whole lot up in an init function, so try this instead…

function widget_init_myuniquewidget() {
	// Check for required functions
	if (!function_exists('register_sidebar_widget'))
		return;

	function widget_myuniquewidget($args) {
	    extract($args);
	?>
	        <?php echo $before_widget; ?>
	            <?php echo $before_title
	                . 'My Unique Widget'
	                . $after_title; ?>
	            Hello, World!
	        <?php echo $after_widget; ?>
	<?php
	}
}

// Delay plugin execution until sidebar is loaded
add_action('widgets_init', 'widget_init_myuniquewidget');

I just need to work out now, how to add wiget options to the wp-admin panel and the next verions of my plugin will be done

PHP – Simple Validate E-Mail function.

I found this by accident, but thought it was useful to take a note as my regular expression knowledge is basic to say the least…

function ValidateEmail($e,$v=-1) { global $verbose; /* Return codes: 0: appears to be a valid email 1: didn't match pattern of a valid email */ if ($v==-1) { $v=$verbose; } if (!preg_match("/^[a-z0-9.+-_]+@([a-z0-9-]+(.[a-z0-9-]+)+)$/i", $e, $grab)) { return 1; } return 0; }

Usage is simple….

if(!(empty($_POST['email']))){ $email = ValidateEmail($_POST['email'],$v=-1); } // check E-Mail Syntax if ($email == 1) { echo "Incorrect Email Address Submitted. "; }

Thanks Shane Marriott

Whoops! – Files back online.

I thought I’d post a quick note to say thanks Tobias for letting me know that my files download area was broken, I was playing with mod_rewrite over the weekend and forgot to check that – DOH !

Anywho, all is sorted now, sorry to those that couldn’t get to my wordpress goodies!

Recent phpBB Topics on WordPress Plugin v0.3

UPDATE: This Plugin has been updated, please download the update from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/phpbb-recent-topics/, and please comment on the new post, thanks.

phpBB recent topics admin interface in WP 2.3.x

Admin GUI

Another day, another plug-in update…..Version 0.2 never saw the light of day, after fixing my compatibility issue I moved straight into setting up the admin interface. So here we have it, a proper implementation

Download phpBB Recent Topics

Installation

Unzip phpbb_recent_topics.tgz in your `/wp-content/plugins/` directory. (You’ll have a new directory, with this plugin in /wp-content/plugins/phpbb_recent_topics)
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Configure the plugin, you need to tell wordpress about phpbb, this is done in the wordpress menu ‘Options’ -> ‘phpBB Recent Topics’
The following Settings are required:
- * The name of your phpBB database (e.g phpbb)
- * The name of the table where topics are held (the default is phpbb_topics )
- * The full url of your forum for links (e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/forum)
- * The number of topics to show. (If left blank you get 5)
Hit ‘Update Options”
To output the list of topics in a page or post…
- * create a new page/post, type {phpbb_recent_topics} , hit ‘Publish’ or ‘Create new page’
To output the list of topics in your theme sidebar…
- * edit sidebar.php and inside <div id=”sidebar”> type…
```
<?php
if (function_exists('phpbb_topics')) {
phpbb_topics();
}
?>
```

How to GRANT wordpress read only access to phpBB ?
If you don’t know it already you need to find your wordpress mysql user id, it’ll be in wp-config.php

define('DB_USER', 'wp_user');     // Your MySQL username

and you should have already found your phpbb database & table for the above.
You need to type the following syntax into your mysql database

GRANT SELECT ON phpbb_database.phpbb_topics TO wp_user@localhost;

this can be achieved by logging into phpmyadmin as your phpbb user, selecting SQL and pasting the correct GRANT into the text box.

Upgrading from Version 0.1
Upgrading is optional. This version has two major changes: The first basically fixes the compatibility issue I have running two php ob_start processes in wordpress; the second is the introduction of a “proper” admin interface (rather than hacking the php file).
To upgrade, make a note of the following settings:

$PHPBBDB = "phpbb"; //phpBB db name
$TOPIC_TABLE = "phpbb_topics"; //phpbb topics table
$SITEURL = "http://www.mydomain.com/forum"; //Forum URL

Deactivate version 0.1, and follow the Installation instructions above

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I output 10 Topics in my Page, and 3 Topics in my Sidebar ?
- Yes ! In the WordPress menu ‘Options’ -> ‘phpBB Recent Topics’, set ‘The number of topics to show’ to 10, and then in your sidebar include…<?php
  if (function_exists(‘phpbb_topics’)) {
  phpbb_topics(3);
  }
  ?>
Can I exclude a certain forum from the list ?
- In this version, the only way to do that is to hack /wp-content/plugins/phpbb_recent_topics/display/display.php, change
```
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $TOPIC_TABLE ORDER BY topic_time DESC LIMIT $LIMIT");
```
  to
```
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $TOPIC_TABLE WHERE forum_id != 1 ORDER BY topic_time DESC LIMIT $LIMIT");
```
  to exclude forum 1 from the list. I plan to setup a proper solution to this in the next version.

root cookie v1.2 (wordpress plugin)

UPDATE: This Plugin has been updated, please comment on the new post, thanks.

I’ve been a bit slow, aja pointed out the fault a few days ago, but I’ve been a bit slow off the mark

Anyway, here’s the official announcement,

root cookie version 1.2

This version primarily fixed the logout issue, and yup, I’ve learnt by my mistakes it loads it gently too

Compatability issues with phpbb recent topics plugin ?

I’ve recently run into a compatibility problem with my phpbb topic plugin, basically I tried to copy the code I did ( the ob_start / stop buffer thing ) and I found that the second time I ran the loop it didn’t work !

Anyway in lieu of working on an admin interface for setting up the phpbb connection I’m solving this, if anyone is having a similar issue please let me know.

Oh, and this might be of interest…

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Nick
Date: 12-Mar-2007 11:38
Subject: Re: Recent phpBB Topics on WordPress Plugin
To: Paul Stokes

Hi Paul,

You can do this by playing with the SQL statement in the plugin, for example
SELECT * FROM $TOPIC_TABLE WHERE forum_id != 1 ORDER BY topic_time DESC LIMIT $limit
would exclude topics from forum 1

hope that helps,
Nick

On 11/03/07, Paul Stokes wrote:

Hello,

First I must say what a great plug-in you have here!
Is there a way to keep the hidden forums topic hidden?
Thanks
-Paul

Recent phpBB Topics on WordPress Plugin

UPDATE: This Plugin has been updated, the latest version is available on wordpress.org please comment on the new post, thanks.

Written primarily for my wife to use in the future, but I’ve developed a pluging that allows you to post a list of recent phpBB threads/topics within wordpress.

If found this plugin by Brandon Alexander but it wasn’t right for my needs, firstly he looks up usernames from phpBB, now my phpBB & wordpress installs don’t share databases and I thought it was a bit of a security risk giving wordpress access to my users password hashes… and secondly that plugin gives a list of recent posts, not what I wanted, and wanted threads (topics).

This is the 1st version, the massive fault with it is that you have to edit the file (to tell it where to find phpBB), I’m not yet smart enough to include an admin interface.

Installation: Download phpbb_recent_topics.txt and save as phpbb_recent_topics.php in your wordpress plugins directory. Edit the file, and change these bits to your appropriate settings…

$PHPBBDB = "phpbb_database"; // phpBB db name
$TOPIC_TABLE = "phpbb_topics"; // phpbb topics table
$SITEURL = "http://www.domain.com/phpbb"; //Forum (phpbb) URL

How to GRANT wordpress read only access to phpBB ?
If you don’t know it already you need to find your wordpress mysql user id, it’ll be in wp-config.php

define('DB_USER', 'wp_user');     // Your MySQL username

and you should have already found your phpbb database & table for the above.
You need to type the following syntax into your mysql database

GRANT SELECT ON phpbb_database.phpbb_topics TO wp_user@localhost;

this can be achieved by logging into phpmyadmin as your phpbb user, selecting SQL and pasting the correct GRANT into the text box.

Plugin Usage.
The plugin can be used in two ways, for those who don’t like editing templates you can call (type)

{phpbb_recent_topics}

from any post or page, and it will be replaced with an list of the last 5 topics.

For those who want to include the list in a sidebar template or similar, call the following function: phpbb_topics(), something like

 if ( function_exists('phpbb_topics') ) { phpbb_topics(5); }

where by the number 5 can be replaced with anything less that 10, and that’ll be the number of topics returned.

Hopefully that all makes sense, feel free to contact me with problems.

UPDATE: Comments about combatability issues here please.

bbCode plugin for bbPress

I’ve ported the bbCode Plugin for WordPress by Jeff Moore to bbPress, seems to work fine; not all the bbCode is marked up as it’s not allowed by default with bbPress, I plan to fix that in version 0.2, but for now Enjoy !

Download bbCode Plugin for bbPress

Installation is simple in the current implementation of bbpress, just rename bbpress_bbcode.txt to bbpress_bbcode.php and place in your my-plugins directory (See bbpPress documentation for full details.)

This plugin has been tested on v0.75 & 1.0-Alpha so hopefully will work on anything in the middle.

Root Cookie WordPress – Plugin updated !

UPDATE: This Plugin has been updated, see please the new post, thanks.

Unless there’s a security risk, I’m always slow to upgrade my blog to the latest & greatest WP, the reason is plugins, when there’s a major revision update, plugins cause problems, so it’s usually best to wait for the maintainers to fix them before upgrading.

Anyway, I started to test the upgrade, and realised that I had a plugin that didn’t work, and yes you guessed it, it was the one I wrote ! – DOH !

It appears that v2.1 was more fussy about pluggable functions, but a quick fix and it’s done, so I give you…

Root Cookie, Version: 1.1

Standard wordpress plugin rules apply, save as root-cookie.php, stick it in your wp-content/plugins directly and activate, log-out (or clear your cookies) and when you log in you’ll get a cookie with the full domain path… happy days !

Avatar BBPress Plugin Browser

I’ve been playing with bbpress, by default there are no Avatars, I’ve made a little adjustment to the plugin by Joshua Hutchins

Here is my Forum Post: Avatar bbPress plugin browser

I wrote an extra function for your plugin so that the avatar can be displayed on the profile page…

function profile_avatar() {
global $user;
if ( get_avatar_loc ( $user->ID ) ) {
echo ‘<img src=”‘ . get_avatar_loc( $user->ID ) . ‘” alt=”‘ . $user->user_login . ‘s Avatar”‘ . ‘ />’;
}
}

Styles & img sizes could be added into the tag as desired…. then in profile.php template, add…

<?php if ( function_exists(‘profile_avatar’) ) { profile_avatar(); } ?>

hope that helps

Blog CheckUp – WordPress: Improve with SEO

I noticed the other day, that the google rank for linickx.com has dropped from a respectable 4, to a pitiful 0 !

The reason for the drop is obvious, November & December have been busy real work months for me, and I’ve not been able to post much online.. no art, no php, no comments, nothing ! Now photomatt has recently blogged about the disconnect between productive good techies and people who have time to blog, so I won’t go into it here; I will just say that I agree, and I think my blog reflects that. What I didn’t realise about my google rank is that the age of your links contributes to your overall PR. So although all those other links to linickx.com still exist on the web they’re getting older so they must not count as much; of course this is speculation, google keep to themselves how their ranking is made up, but it’s the only thing that’s changed.

Anyway to get back on the map I thought I’d better take a look at these SEO posts I’ve been seeing about the place (which I guess this is yet another of ! )

1st step – site maps !
Now I already had a sitemap, powered by Arne Brachhold’s wordpress plug in , but it doesn’t hurt to check it’s working every now & again; to do this I logged into google sitemaps and checked out the reports, basically it’ll tell you if there have been any errors, remembers errors mean google can’t view the page properly, which in turn effects it’s PR. I had a couple (4) of “404 Not founds”, so I went through my posts and fixed them.

Validate your pages !
Search engines can’t see your site, they can only read the html code, and if that’s wrong, then so will the index and PR be. I’d gotten out of the habit of checking pages, you’ll notice at the bottom of my theme is a link to say this site is valid, it’s really important that after posting you click this to make sure it works; if it doesn’t, well all is lost before you start.

Page & Post titles
All the articles talk about setting your page titles correctly, I’d noticed ages ago that anaylitics showed the same title for stuff but I’d never gotten round to looking at it. It turns out I’d made a “school boy error” on my custom theme, and the <title> tag within my html didn’t grab the post title from wordpress – DOH ! It was eaily fixed by adding <?php the_title(); ?> into header.php. If you didn’t write your theme there is a plugin that can do it for you…. sadly neither of these fix the titles for my custom scripts, so I guess I’ll have to stick that back on the to-do list !

Meta Tags
“Back in the day” meta tags where the way serach engines classified your site, but abuse of the keywords tag, by repeating words to improve PR, means that they’re not as important as they used to be. Today though, I’m on the search engine offensive apart from spam I’m willing to try anything. This wordpress plugin does the job for you. The advantage of using the plugin, rather than setting them in my theme, means that the description can be dynamially added based on the post, rather than having the same description for all pages, the more words that people search for that hit me, the better !

Related Posts
Search engines need a way to weave through your site, in the past I’ve relied on my web site map (not the same as sitemap.xml) to do the job, but it appears that this is not enough, so I went for the related entries wordpress plugin, the good thing about the latest version is that the formatting can be done within the wordpress admin interface. (The reason this is good, as it means minimal changes to my theme php, which is when problems occur.)

Share This !
At the beginning of what is becoming a marathon post, I talked about my PR being related to incoming links (i.e. links to linickx.com). In the past I’ve just had a small “Bookmark Page” link on each post, this link would then submit the page to del.icio.us for people to share, well alex king has written a share this plugin to expand the idea, but for any service. I like the idea alot, now all I need to do is to find a way to submit my posts to all the services automagically.

Nothing to do with SEO
The final change I’ve made was to install a snap plugin, now this will have no effect on my PR, but it is quite cool, what it does is add a little floating window preview any external links, allowing readers to take a glimpse of what they’re clicking on before they actually click. To be honest, I’ve not yest decided if this is a good thing or annoying, but would be cool is if it could be plugged into mcafee site advisor so that users could see if it’s a safe link before clicking it.

Fingers crossed this will have an impact, but one thing is for sure, it won’t hurt !

Cookie Path Plugin For WordPress 2.0 (root Cookie)

UPDATE: This Plugin has been updated, the below links to the new file, but please comment on the new post, thanks.

I’ve been busy this AM, my site is a little bit integrated with WordPress, basically I call the header and footer from WP so that my custom code changes themes when WordPress does

I want to take it further and use the authentication cookie, so that my code recognizes me when I log in (in the same way WordPress does). In order for linickx.com to see the cookie set by linickx.com/blog, I need to change the COOKIEPATH. The change is actually quite simple, in fact the “set cookie” function is a pluggable one

The function / plugin I’ve written is really simple, all I’ve done is change the PATH to be / (root) that way linickx.com or linickx.com/blah can reference the cookie, and because it’s set to / the plugin can be used on any site !

To install:

Save root-cookie.txt in your plugins directory as root-cookie.php (Right Click – Save As)
From the Plugin Manager in the Dashboard, “Activate” the plugin
Log out, and log in again
Done

Now your cookie can be referenced from any custom code you may have written outside of your WordPress install directory !