How It Works

Some of you might be wondering how we linked SFN and WordPress together. Others are just glad that it does work. For those of you that wonder, here’s the answer.

WordPress and vBulletin don’t integrate easily. (There are plugins for each to make them integrate, but we use WordPress MU — the multi-user edition.) We decided (or rather, dave decided) that the best way to do it would be to hack WordPress to use vBulletin’s user database.

This required writing a WordPress plugin that overrides WordPress’s native login functions using vBulletin’s system. We then disabled WordPress’s own login page and forced it to redirect to vBulletin’s, since WordPress doesn’t know how to create a new session in vB’s system.

From there it was just a matter of beating WordPress with a stick until it worked the way we intended it to.

If you’re interested in being able to integrate WordPress MU and vBulletin yourself, ask and I might be able to help.

11 Comments

  1. I must say that, from an end-user perspective, your integration is practically seamless. I’ve never bothered reading people’s blogs until I saw them being posted by people who’d already earned my respect in the fora, and you’ve added a lot of value to the site with this functionality.

    As I’ve mentioned before in the fora, the logout link in the blogs does not log me out of SFN, but I presume it works for users who are logged in only to WordPress? If you can’t get it to work with the SFN logout, perhaps it could be made invisible to users logged in via SFN? Just a thought… Buttons that don’t work properly are a bit of a pet peeve of mine (not that this should matter to you, just sayin’…)

    By the way, for future reference, beating something with an iron pipe works WAY better than a measely stick. 😉

  2. vBulletin has a self-defense measure to keep people from tricking you into logging out, and it appears I’d have to figure out how to log you out properly with vB’s system.

    I’ll see if I can fix the link.

    (And we have special administrator sticks. They’re sort of Swiss-army sticks, really. They function as ban sticks and software sticks.)

  3. Thanks for the compliment iNow. I did the grunt work of setting up the signup page and etting WPMU talking to vB, but Capn’s dealt with all the fiddly details of getting styles, front page and all that jazz set up properly so big kudos to him.

    Although, I can’t now remember how I did it myself. Hah.

  4. Yeah, sorry for the distinct lack of credit given to you there. I looked through your code when trying to fix a permissions problem in WordPress and wow, I’m glad I didn’t have to write that :-p

  5. Hi Guys,

    Ive just stumbled accross your post from google, doing a search to do exactly what you have done here… I started a vbulletin board a few weeks ago and am looking to allow my users to create blogs through wpmu as well – while Im “semi competent” with php if you guys have already done it I would really really appreciate either a pointer in how to do this, or even if you were feeling really charitable a look at your source to do it myself.

    The main page of my site is http://www.pokerfreerollpasswords.com where you will see three links, the forum (300 members already!), the league (custom coded to allow my players to sign up by joining a group in vbulletin, then it tracks their performances, and the “blog – COMING SOON”, well, with your help I can hopefully remove that “coming soon” text asap!

    thanks guys

    PGP-Admin

  6. Are you fairly good with PHP and MySQL? It was a challenge to get WordPress working, even with the script we used.

    I can clean up the PHP we’ve done and release it, but I don’t know how much time I have available for support.

    If you’d like an easy solution, you might look into purchasing vBulletin Blogs: http://www.vbulletin.com/features_blog.php

    If you really want WordPress MU, I’ll put together a ZIP with all the files you need and a small readme.

  7. PFP admin I would watch out for this guy, Martin Macdonald has already had 3 sites he owns shut down for violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I have found information that he was selling scripts that he did not have permission to sell and once he was caught he passed the buck and the people who purchased the scripts from him were not refunded. It was at his turnkeyfacebookapps a simple search of the name will back up the info. He also owned a poker site called costadelpoker which the poker network he was on pulled the plug on the site because he runs a poker forum that steals events off of other poker forums. Hostgator did pull the plug on his site, he has now moved his poker forum to an overseas network. He also owns a few domain hosting sites one that is for free he informed members who registered there would be no banners on their sites that information was false. He also lied in a pervious auction about his sites stats check it out for yourself. “1,331 websites hosted, active webmaster forum, 50,000 backlinks” “Seems that there are less than 384 active users and not 1,331 websites. Is this accurate? This info is according to myIPneighbors hostedwith has the IP address: 67.228.39.240 We found 384 other sites hosted on the IP address 67.228.39.240”

    His site mogmedia net is another joke website design using a standard template.

    The scripts on his site I would check to see if he has permission to use them.

    Sale os WSOP site which he did not have permissions to use the WSOP logos.

    marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/17984

    If you visit Mogmedia.net look at his folio page. You will see an image of the site that he made. You can also see his listing for selling the site at the link in my second post. Now if you view the site you will now see all the WSOP images he stole are removed from the site by the new owner. wsop2008satellites com

    capitolroi who bought his WSOP2008 site “I got a cease and desist from harrah’s after buying the site from him.”

    Sold the WSOP site and did not have permission from the WSOP to use their images. Looks like a law suit.

    For a real poker forum visit http://www.freerolltourny.com

  8. I came here searching for exactly the same solution. Can you give me some insight as to how to do this or if possible, share your code?

    Thanks.

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