Why integrate Wordpress with Vanilla

scherem

I've read a lot about how to integrate Wordpress and Vanilla, but nothing about why. This whole idea is new to me, and sounds perfect for a site I'm working on. Before I start working on it though, can someone explain to me a couple of things

1) Why should I do this-- what advantages does it have?
2) disadvantages?
3) If I make a test site with a new vanilla install and WP, how easy would it be to migrate the DB to Vanilla later? Would it be as simple as changing some of the lines in conf/settings.php ?

Oh and why I've been new to Vanilla (less then a week), this forum has been great for answers and friendliness. Thanks for making this 'the right' choice for me.

lech

First you need to know exactly how WordPress works in regard to users & accounts. Like Vanilla, there are roles: Administrators, Users and everything in between albeit they're obviously named differently in some places. While there is no built-in feature with WP to manage user levels and tweak each role setting like you can within Vanilla, there are extensions which do let you perform this if needed if you can operate a search engine. Which I assume you can, but that's not important at the moment.

As separate entities, WP and Vanilla will obviously operate independently and not know one or the other exists and should play nicely on your server. If you have an active blog and accept people registering to post comments and often find that as a result your single posts stem into lengthly discussions often branching into alternate discussions it might be time to consider implementing Vanilla or an alternative to handle these discussions.

You could set up Vanilla without integrating it with WordPress, but the problem would be that users would have to register once to post stuff on your blog and once with Vanilla. It works, but it's not entirely elegant and eventually you're users will bitch and moan about redundant logins, passwords etc. The benefit you get from integrating Vanilla with WordPress is pretty simple: Your users authenticate from and register to one user table for both applications, not two separate tables (one for each app vs one for both).

As for the disadvantages: The only one I can think of is that while it's working, it's not entirely foolproof or immediately compatible with the latest WP release. the WP release cycle seems to be increasing lately so any benefit you'd get would be mostly from the add-on playing bridge and the person maintaining that add-on.

I haven't actually set this up for myself or had a chance to play with it, but that's a simply summary of how things work and an overview. More than likely someone who's done this repeatedly and maintains a working example will be more useful in explaining the dirty details for and against it.

jimw

@lech: Thank you for that explanation. I could never see a reason to do this integration, well, at least in my small world. Your 2nd paragraph gave me the needed "turn into lengthy discussions and possibly split into other discussions". Managing these discussions is obviously what a forum does best.

lech

Yeah, it's all vs what you need vs what you want. If you want to keep them separate that's your call, but if you feel it's time to turn your blog entries into less of a threaded discussion and turn everyone toward a real forum your safest bet is integrating them providing you have a lot of already-registered WP users. It all depends how you handle commenting on the WP end of things really.

Personally, the only people I allow to register on my WP installations are myself and the other authors. While the option to allow users to register themselves is a nice touch, the last thing I want to be managing is dozens of spambot accounts on top of spammy comments. But to each their own.