I was building a vbulletin forum today and one of our requirement was to integrate vbulletin with our main web site which is built on wordpress. Putting the whole forum on a iframe inside the web site is bulky and uncomfortable because vbulletin has too much controls.
And we wanted to do this simply by just showing the new threads on our pages and then users can click and go to the forum. When I was thinking about this first example which came in to mind was what linode was doing to display new forum posts on their community page, which is looks like this,
I have discovered that best way of achieving this by using RSS feeds. Sure there are many other ways to parse information to a php web site but that’s insecure and require some customized coding. In this guide I will explain how I did this simply by using RSS feeds and external.php feature on vbulletin
The Guide
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Setup Vbulletin to enable external.php file and RSS feeds
By default vbulletin has RSS feeds feature built in to display new threads and this comes in handy on this. Vbulletin RSS feeds displays on yourforumurl.com/external.php . You check if its already enabled navigate to /external.php . If you get a blank page its disabled and if you can see RSS feeds of your new threads showing up you are almost done.
Enable RSS feeds on Vbulletin
- Go to your Vbulletin admincp and navigate to Settings, on that settings tab click on “Options”
- Choose “External Data Provider” and click edit settings
- On that put “yes” to “Enable RSS Syndication”
After enabling the options your settings will look like above screencap.
Now your Vbulletin side of things are done!
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WordPress Integration
There is an app for that 🙂
Download and install the In Post RSS Feed plugin on your wordpress site. And you are done!
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Display new threads on a wordpress post
When you are writing a post, wordpress will display a box called “In Post RSS” below the box you write the content, like this
On the feed title, enter the desired title to display above the threads ex- New Threads on our Forum
And on the Feed URL box, enter your RSS feed url, which is yourforum.com/external.php?type=RSS2 ( after you enable RSS feeds on vbulletin, RSS V2.0 feeds will be displayed on /external.php?type=RSS2 and you will need to enter )
And you are done 🙂
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Display new Threads on WordPress Page
Its almost same as displaying on a post, but on this you wont be presented with a box to enter the feed url and title. But there will be a box called custom fields and you can choose “ipr_feedtitle” on the drop down menu and add the title there and again add a new custom field selecting “ipr_feedurl” and feed address like shown below
And voila its done 🙂
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Outcome
Your new threads will be displayed like this
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