WordPress Bridge?

[Achilleus]

I have a friend asking if Sphinx will provide the WordPress Bridge that E2 has.  Will the already existing bridge work with Sphinx or would it need a few modifications?

[Luke]

Well, it's my bridge, so yeah I'll be releasing a new one. Might be a little bit, but we'll have those out too. Our main focus is on the core though, and we can't lose site of that.

[Agahnim]

Any idea when this'll be ready?  I have a site running Wordpress 2.1 that several people would like to see bridged with an SMF forum, but according to Luke the Enigma bridge isn't compatible with Wordpress 2.1.

[Luke]

It's not. It's pretty flaky, and there were some function changes.

As to a "when". I can't say. That isn't on my priority list at the moment, as the focus of Chris and I is on the core. Any extra goodies (at least written by us), will have to take a back seat when the core is being worked.

If I were to guess, it would be anywhere from 3-6 weeks. But, there's no guarantees there either. It's just when my time allotted for working on this project allow for me to work on that bridge.

[Agahnim]

I don't know if my users would be happy to wait that long.

Until the bridge becomes available, would you recommend using this?  It's much more hackish than Sphinx or Enigma, but at least it's compatible with SMF 1.1.  I'm hoping it would be with Wordpress 2.1 also.

[Luke]

That bridge is horrible, if you're looking for an honest opinion.

Not that I want to turn someone off of Sphinx, I want the world to use it. But, right now it can't be everything to everybody, unfortunately.

It sounds like you need a forum for an existing WP site. Have you considered Vanilla or bbPress? They both integrate just fine with WP 2.1, heck... I've even integrated them both with MU.

[Agahnim]

I'm pretty sure BBpress doesn't have the features I'm looking for, and as far as I know Vanilla doesn't either.

I'd like a forum that has all of the features that have become commonplace for forums nowadays--avatars, separate forum categories, and the ability to view a listing of these categories without viewing all the individual threads in each of them.  I'm pretty sure BBpress doesn't have those features, and none of the Vanilla forum's I've been to have the last one either.  Do you know if there's a way to enable that option in Vanilla, and most forums just don't use it?

Also: does Vanilla support multiple themes?  I don't like the default one very much.

[Luke]

You 'd have to ask the vanilla folks.

They've got an extension for just about everything, which makes it nice. You can add what you need, and not worry about the stuff you don't.