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Integrate PunBB forum into Wordpress

ByLiew Cheon-Fong

As I promised previously after installed LiewCF.com Forum, here I describe how to integrate PunBB forum into Wordpress. The softwares used are Wordpress 1.2.2 and PunBB 1.2.4. The same method probably works for later version, too.

Preparation:
Rip the header and footer code of your Wordpress template. Remember to remove any Wordpress template tags from the code, also the CSS stylesheet links of your template. Here I use _HEADER_ as template header code, _FOOTER_ as template footer code and _CSS_ as template css stylesheet links.

Step-by-step:

  1. Edit main.tpl (remember to make a backup first) that sit in http://www.YOUR_PATH/forum/include/template directory.
  2. Plug in your template header(_HEADER_) and footer(_FOOTER_) code into main.tpl. It will looks something like this:
    [html]
    < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


    _FOOTER_



[/html]

  • You are almost done now. Now we need to tweak the PunBB forum CSS code to make the forum looks better in Wordpress. Goto http://www.YOUR_PATH/forum/style/ and edit the CSS code of the PunBB template you are using. I use PunBB Oxygen template, so I edit Oxygen.css.
    In fact, the PunBB forum looks fine after done Step #2 but the font size is very small in Internet Explorer. That’s why I tweak the forum’s CSS code for IE.
  • That’s it. You are done! :)

    • Additional: PunBB Plug-ins
    Beside default PunBB installation, I install RSS mod and Active Topics mod from Alex King PunBB Mods collection.

    Thought:
    Hope this small instruction to integrate PunBB forum into Wordpress is helpful to some bloggers. Initially, I was planning to use miniBB for my blog but its simple (read: limited) admin control scared me off.

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