Integrating your phpBB topics and posts into WordPress … or any web page!

As some know, I am the developer of phpBB’s Smartfeed extension. This extension provides an ATOM, RSS1 or RSS2 feed of posts and topics on your website.

These feeds allow people to read posts on the forum remotely using a newsreader application, like one built into MS Outlook or using feed aggregator sites like feedly.com. The main advantage of feeds is that it allows you to read a forum without actually having to visit the site. If you regularly read lots of sites, using a newsreader is very efficient way to read content compared to actually visiting each site.

Smartfeed is not the only extension that does this. In fact, if you don’t need to support the RSS format and only want to show posts in public forums, an ATOM Feed has been built into phpBB since version 3.0.6. You might want to read the knowledge base article to learn the syntax to use. You can control your feeds in the Administration Control Panel: ACP > General tab > Board configuration > Feed settings.

Sometimes you want to highlight recent topics and posts on your larger website, or on another domain. For example, you may have a phpBB forum in a folder on a WordPress site. You might want to use a WordPress widget to highlight current topics and posts on a sidebar of your WordPress site. The links in the sidebar will take people directly to the post or topic of interest.

I will demonstrate how to do this using WordPress. However, conceptually you don’t need WordPress to do this. You just need something that can read an ATOM or RSS feed of your forum, and parse its XML into HTML for display, or write your own program to do this. For example, if you are familiar with jQuery, there are a number of jQuery feed plugins that would work. The PHP SimpleXML library is one way you can do it in PHP with a short PHP program.

Here’s one way to do it in WordPress:

1. Spend some time figuring out what you want to highlight in WordPress: recent posts or recent topics. I will show a list of recent posts. In this example, I first installed my Smartfeed extension. This is because I got a SimplePie parser error when I used phpBB’s ATOM feed. This is due to a bug when parsing ISO dates in ATOM feeds using the SimplePie library. SimplePie is bundled with WordPress. I reported the bug. The resulting URLs for the feed can be seen if Smartfeed is installed. It is in the HTML source for the forum. I will use the second link because the ?y=2 parameter creates a RSS feed instead of an ATOM feed to avoid the SimplePie bug.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="ATOM" href="/phpbb/app.php/smartfeed/feed" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="/phpbb/app.php/smartfeed/feed?y=2" />

2. Note: if using Smartfeed, and you want a list of recent topics only, the resulting URL will look something like this. You should be logged out when using the Smartfeed interface. Note that you can refine the URL in the Smartfeed user interface. lp=1 limits the feed to the last post in the topic only, t=2 suppresses the time limit for retrieving posts, s=1 gives a standard sort from most recent to least recent, i=0 means to not require a minimum number of words in the post, y=2 forces a RSS2 feed, d=3 sets the feed style to use HTML, w=0 means not to limit the maximum number of words in the post, and tt=1 means to show topic titles only. There are lots of variations so use the Smartfeed interface to get the output just the way you like it.  

http://127.0.0.1/phpbb/app.php/smartfeed/feed?lp=1&t=2&s=1&i=0&y=2&d=3&w=0&tt=1

3. Presumably you have installed WordPress already. If you haven’t, it can be downloaded from wordpress.org. Or you can usually install it from Plesk or cPanel.
4. Login to WordPress as an administrator and go to the WordPress dashboard.
5. WordPress comes with a RSS Widget preinstalled that also can handle ATOM feeds. You can find it off the dashboard: Appearance > Widgets
6. Click on the RSS Widget then press the Add Widget button which appears, which by default appears on the sidebar.
7. In the sidebar, click on the RSS Widget that was added. Enter the URL for the feed and give it an optional description. Note that it needs to be the full URL, not the partial one shown above. Then press Save.

   

8. I dragged the widget to the top of the sidebar so it would appear first on the sidebar. Of course, you can place it anywhere on the sidebar that you like.
9. Go to your WordPress site and find it on the sidebar.

   

Note that this works for any domain, providing the feed is publicly accessible. So you can promote this approach to have similar sites show your list of recent topics or posts. Note also that my Smartfeed extension has a number of options to make the post subject or topic title prettier if the default looks too wordy.