Creating fully functional Web sites isn’t quite as simple as it should be.
I’m learning this as I’m working on a site for a group. The requirements are fairly simple. It should have:
- Latest news and announcements on the home page
- A message board
- A photo/video gallery
- Single sign-on (so you log into the site once and can then access those message boards and upload photos to the gallery
Like I said, pretty straightforward. So I thought.
I am building the site with WordPress. I love it. As a content management system it’s downright incredible. (And no, it’s not just a blogging platform.) Unless you have a tremendous site with a lot of users, you can do anything with it — either with the base package or via the hundreds of terrific plugins that add functionality. (And I think you could even create that “tremendous” site with it.)
Creating the basic site was easy — that’s what WordPress is great at. I picked a theme similar to what I liked, then tweaked the heck out of it. News goes here, archives are formatted like this, and so on. Soon I had a basic home page and layouts for the interior pages.
Then came the message boards, what I think of as a core component to a site — there needs to be some way of having users communicate.
Board education
Responding to blog posts is one way, but then you end up with dozens or hundreds of separate conversations. A message board gives you a centralized location for discussion, as well as the ability to do things like browse by topic, find unread messages, and so on. Blog comments don’t work that way; a message board was it.
Trouble: Most message boards are ugly, overly complex, and confusing. I wanted something clean.
For example, the site was going to have about a half-dozen forums, and I didn’t want to clutter the page with a section of forum “categories” — there weren’t any. (Rather, all five or six forums would belong to the single category, so listing that one category seemed silly, and it took up space.)
Simplicity was key. I didn’t need a box of smilies to choose from, or choices of font, color, and so on. This was a basic message board, not an art project. (Italic, sure. Links to Web page, absolutely. But being able to choose font, color, and size? Forget it.)
I also wanted to integrate the boards with the look and feel of the rest of the site. Bottom line: I needed software that would let me customize it easily — to clean out stuff I didn’t need from a page, and to fit it into the site’s design.
Oh, and it needed to share login info with the site in general.There shouldn’t be a separate login for the message boards. Once you’re in, you’re in.
That turned out to be trickier than I thought. There isn’t a lot of message-board software that integrates with WordPress. An old plugin called “WP-Forum” was the first thing I saw, but it isn’t supported any more and there are security issues.
I ended up with two possibilities, both of which can use the general (WordPress) site login: Simple:Press Forum and bbPress.
Nothing’s simple
Simple:Press is a WordPress plugin,so it uses the site login seamlessly. And it has all the functions you could want. Great! Simple and easy, and my biggest issue was taken care of. Now I just need to customize… oh.
Simple:Press is customizable, in theory. There are some nice templates available. But nowhere is there documentation for creating or tweaking them.
WordPress, like many things, uses a straightforward scheme for designing a site: It has specific codes that automatically insert a particular piece of content. So you design a page, and where you want the headline to go, you put in the <$headline> tag. WordPress knows to insert the article’s headline there.
So you create a template for every kind of page on your site — the home page, an individual article, an About page, etc., and WordPress reuses that template, popping in whatever content the user asks for in place of the headline tag, the author tag, the date tag, etc.
But Simple:Press doesn’t use that kind of templating. And because there’s no documentation of how to create a template (including the all-important ‘list of tags you can use’), I couldn’t customize the forum. I could figure out (I think) how to remove things I didn’t want, such as that unnecessary list of forum groups, but I couldn’t redesign the Simple:Press forum the way I wanted it to.
So off to bbPress, which is created by Automattic, the same people who make WordPress. (It’s also free, like WordPress.)
But get this: Even though bbPress is by the same folks, and even though a message board is a popular request for a Web site, the folks at Automattic don’t integrate bbPress with WordPress. You can’t have a single login; users have to create an account on the site in general, and a separate account the message boards. Argh!
But wait — lots of people are asking for integration, and plugin authors have come to the rescue. You can integrate them! You can have a single signon. W00t!
Um… yeah. But it’s not a matter of taking 30 seconds to install a plugin. To get the two products to work together, you have to, let’s see…
- Install bbPress, and edit its configuration file to use the WordPress database — so you have to know the name of that database, which you get via your Web site’s control panel.
- Install the bbPress plugin that enables WordPress integration; it’s called Freshly Baked Cookies.
- Pull out two variables from your WordPress options page (which isn’t all that easy to find) — AUTH_SALT and LOGGED_IN_SALT — and put them in the right place in the plugin’s file.
- Copy four lines from your WordPress config file — SECURE_AUTH_KEY, NONCE_KEY, LOGGED_IN_KEY, and AUTH_KEY — and put them in your bbPress config file. (You may not need all four, but I wasn’t taking chances.)
- Mess with bbPress’s WordPress integration settings to make sure everything’s in place.
This may not seem to be that complex if you’re used to working with this stuff, but here’s the rub: There’s no single place with all this info. I had to go through bbPress message boards, WordPress message boards, and the plugin author’s message boards to piece it all together. (And nowhere did it mention that you need to tell bbPress to use the WordPress database instead of its own!)
But the end result: Single login works. And bbPress uses a template system much like WordPress’s, so…
Wait. There’s no documentation for bbPress templates? None. You can look at an existing template and glean a lot about the various tags it uses, but there’s no list. So I could see that such and such must insert the list of available forums, and such and such must insert the number of posts, but it’s all guesswork.
ARGH!
How can companies that make a product as slick and powerful as WordPress not bother to write even the most basic documentation for bbPress? Yes, it’s mostly volunteers, but we’re talking about a list of tags (like this one for WordPress) — tags that you need to know in order to work with the forums. Talk about frustrating.
But it works, even if I haven’t yet fixed the forums to fit into the site (that’s tonight). And then there’s the photo gallery — I need to let registered users, and only registered users, upload pics.
The best gallery software out there (and yes, it’s free) is Zenphoto. But can I get it to integrate?
To be continued.
The Fray
More Web creation adventures | Andrew Kantor's Place says:
[...] my goal of creating a simple, clean Web site with news, message boards, and a user-filled photo album is getting [...]
Trae says:
2 Notes.
Wordpress’s Codex is a wiki that has had years of people adding content and wide adoption of the wordpress platform. bbPress is not widely used and therefor doesn’t have the background and people to push a decent documentation source out there. It’s like trying to find information on Wordpress back when it was version 1…it was just as difficult.
There is a way to integrate Zenphoto w/Wordpress logins. But, it’s not going to be all peaches and cream. The best alternative I can think of is just use WP 2.7’s gallery functions for your image uploading needs. In fact there is work on various tracs for later versions of WP to enhance the functionality of the gallery capabilities. But it may be too difficult to teach the users how to use the gallery functions effectively than it will be to handle the logon process.
Point 2.1, keep in mind that every upgrade to Wordpress/bbPress/ZenPhoto has the potential to break the common login to the other services. I have had trouble with this for years since plugin authors often take months to upgrade their plugins. It’s happened to me with WPG2 plugin, Coppermine Plugin, and others.
Hope it helps and doesn’t discourage…