Best Served Cold

Web design and development

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BBPress and WordPress magic quotes!

Just a quick technical article to those of you who are trying to integrate BBPress and WordPress.

There are a number of odd little things which I thought I’d share after a couple of evenings of frustration!

Firstly, do BBPress 0.9 and WordPress 2.6.2 integrate? Urm, no. Seriously, don’t even try! There are a number of fundamental differences in the technology to do with the Cookie keys that make this pretty much impossible. Basically 2.6.2 has three Cookie keys with Salt, where as BBPress 0.9 is has two like the old WP technology.

We tried WordPress 2.6.2 with BBPress 1.0 (Alpha), but it’s just not stable enough to put anywhere with any real traffic, so decided to back pedal and use 2.5.1 with 0.9 to be on the safe side.

The second major problem we came up against after the WordPress-BBPress integration was the magic quotes. Because wordpress calls in the “bb-config.php” and related files for integration, in the “wp-config.php” file, all the stuff WordPress does to $_POST variables gets done by BBPress as well! To get round this, go to around line 388 in “wp-settings.php” file and hash out $_POST = add_magic_quotes($_POST); and hey presto! Mind you, this was on a Zeus server, other LAMP systems seem fine, but that’s probably php setup rather than the web server.