After a long hiatus, lasting almost a year, I’ve decided to go back to this website and start doing something productive.

First of, I’ve done a major clean up on the blog part of the website, removing nearly 500 blog posts, which were more or less about nothing. Back when I started this WordPress blog I did an import of my old, old LiveJournal blog, which was really the ramblings of a teenager turning into an adult. Not really something I’m interested in having on-line any more, so it was unpublished, meaning that if you should so desire, I can go back to reading it myself and see how much I’ve changed in almost 15 years.

What I’ve left on the blog is some more technical posts, about playing around with Ubuntu, modding an Xbox 360 and rooting an Android phone. I’m pretty sure that is the direction this blog will go for now.

Getting back to the actual theme of this post, I’ve been looking at integrating my forum with the WordPress blog for a long time, but I haven’t really found a good solution of merging my phpBB3 forum with the blog, so I have the same user database and more importantly, the same look and feel.

However now it seems that I’ve finally found something that will satisfy my need and that is migrating the old forum into a bbPress forum. bbPress is essentially nothing more than a plugin for WordPress and thus will share the same user database and it integrates into the administration module of WordPress. This means that all changes I should desire to do to the forum, can be done on the fly directly from the blog, which is really appealing to me.

Unfortunately, there are some backsides to migrating from phpBB to bbPress. Mainly it’ll mean that none of the attachments (pictures, files etc.) from the old forum will transfer over to the new forum. This will be a loss as there is a lot of great things on the forum now that I’d like to save if I could. Also all the user settings and the different user permissions won’t transfer and will have to be fixed manually by hand.

This means that I’ll have my work cut out to fix this, but the fact that I’ll only have to manage one administration module, one CSS file etc. just outweighs the bad things about migrating.

The work with migrating the forums will commence during my summer holiday, which is already ongoing, but I haven’t picked a time when I actually will start doing it. Take this as a heads up, as I will be closing down the old forum during the migration progress and replace the forum with a dummy page telling you to login here, where you should get access to all your old posts and so on.

I won’t start before I’ve made a dummy forum, where I will start to work on migrating the new layout into bbPress as well, so it all becomes nice and uniform.

Stay safe and happy in the sun.