After my recent adventures with phpBB I’ve decided to switch to bbPress. phpBB has served me well for a while, but there are two major downsides: you can’t use custom PHP inside your template, and to install plugins you have to edit a lot of the core files. The latter especially sucks, so I went looking around for a better piece of forum software.
bbPress
bbPress seemed like a good choice: small, easily customizable and a very usable admin panel. Unfortunately development has been rather slow lately and some basic functions you’d expect on a forum are still missing. Fortunately though, it’s so easily customizable and looks a lot like WordPress (which I have plenty experience with) that I was able to write some plugins of my own.
One of the most important missing pieces to me was the ability to hide a section of the forums from certain usergroups. As an admin, I want to have a place where I can discuss ongoing projects and other administrative activities with my fellow admins without everyone reading along. So I made a plugin that allows me to hide forums from usergroups I specifiy in the admin panel.
If you use the Simple Facebook Connect plugin for WordPress (and I really do recommend using it), you might have noticed that you will get an error message each time you login to the admin panel.
Notice: you're using the auto-generated password for your account. Would you like to change it to something you'll remember easier?
This is not just something admins see: every user can access certain parts of the WP admin panel, for instance when they want to change their settings. Usually this warning would be pretty useful too, but if you use Facebook Connect to login you will never ever use or have to change your password. This means the warning is totally useless, and should just be hidden.
I wrote a small plugin that does just that: hide the generated password error for users that login using Facebook (or as WordPress itself calls it, “default password nagging”).
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m trying to get a phpBB forum to allow user registrations using Facebook Connect. So far all looks good, so I’ll explain how I managed to do this.
So the past days I’ve been trying to get FaceBook Connect working for phpBB 3. I still haven’t got it working, but at least I found a tutorial that is supposed to help me out:
Near the end though a zipfile is linked that is supposed to contain the actual plugin. However, the creator of the plugin has disappeared, and so has his website http://svmods.com. Not only is the plugin not supported anymore, the zipfile has gone completely.
Stubborn as I am, I still want to give the plugin a try, even though it’s been abandonded. So, I did some research and found the original zipfile. For anyone who’s interested I uploaded it here: svmods_facebook_connect_for_phpbb.zip
Disclaimer
As I said, the plugin is abandonded. I cannot guarantuee it will work, or if it’s safe to use if it does work. I will post updates here when I find out more, please do let me know what your experience is with this plugin!
I love WordPress plugins. In fact, I love them so much that on one of the websites I’m currently working on I have 26 plugins activated and more will be added in the foreseeable future.
One downside of plugins however is that a lot of them come with CSS and JavaScript, which have to be incorporated into the theme at some point to get the plugins to work. This often means an extra request for a .css file and/or .js file is added to the theme’s <head> tag. This, of course, is bad practice: you should try to make as little HTTP requests as possible to keep your site up to speed, put your javascript in the bottom of the page to ensure faster rendering, and it also gets real tough to maintain all those separate files if many things have to change (like styling the plugin’s elements).
Gladly, WordPress offers ways of disabling the CSS and JS files that are added by these plugins. I’ll elaborate on how the adding and removing of both works. If you already know or don’t care and just want the script, just jump to the final code now. Let’s take styles for example, and look at how these are disabled. (more…)