Hey guys, sorry for the potentially dumb question, but I've had a quick look round and found nothing that completely clarifies the situation for me, so I thought I'd ask. I'm just starting up a website/forum combo. The forum software is the latest version of phpBB (3.0.5), and the 'website' section is Wordpress 2.8 - I briefly considered using a phpBB portal, but the lack of decent (and working) options for the current version combined with the custom forum theme I'm using and my complete inexperience with coding meant that it wasn't really an option at the time. Anyway, I'm wondering if it's possible for Wordpress and phpBB to share a MySQL database. What benefits and drawbacks would this give me? Bear in mind that there may be modifications to the database if I were to add hacks/mods to phpBB in the future. My reasoning is that I would like people to be able to comment on the wordpress articles AND post on the forum without having to have two separate logins. Is this attainable and more importantly, practical? I know bridge programs exist for phpbb to Joomla, but I've not really looked into the possibilities with Wordpress. Thanks in advance, guys. For what little it's worth, I'll +rep useful answers.
I think this is possible but it might require a bit of coding. I think there are some hacks/mods available to create a bridge between them, have a look on the PHPBB website.
Thanks Dodger - I managed to get an experimental phpBB to Joomla bridge half-working, so I'll look into something like that. Unfortunately, as 3.0.5 isn't particularly old yet, there are hardly any mods available at the moment. :-/ Can anyone answer for certain?
Yes they can provided that they don't have a table called exactly the same thing as the other. For example if they both needed a table called 'comments', then you would need to modify the code in one of them to use 'comments2' instead. Otherwise you are fine. At the same time, if you did need to use 2 different databases, your users still wouldn't need two different logins. In short, the database connection code doesn't use the user's specific id and password to connect, but a generic one just for the type of connection being made to the database. The user's specific id and password lets them log onto the system and use the file(s) that makes those generic database connections.
Right, I think that makes sense. So technically speaking, it's not a huge task if both databases are more or less empty? If that's the case, I'm almost certainly going to go for this option, it's simply a case of working out whether it's attainable with something like WP-United (google it, I can't link yet... ) if I do it myself, or whether it makes more sense to bite the financial bullet and hand it over to a proper PHP buff. Anyway, thanks for the reply. +rep