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

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();
    }
    ?>

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.

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.

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/