Mark has created an initial helpful guide to integrating Wordpress and Vanilla. If you haven’t come across Vanilla, it’s a wonderful free open-source forum system. (See my reflections on switching to Vanilla.)

In short this is what the tutorial gets you to do:

1. Install Wordpress and Vanilla; make them use the same database.
2. Add come lines of code (template provided) to your Vanilla configuration file to force Vanilla to use Wordpress’ usernames/passwords.
3. Alter the Wordpress’ user table in the database by adding in the fields Vanilla has for its users.
4. Create a Vanilla file which does the checking to see whether people are logged in or not with Wordpress. (Code provided.)
5. Add some lines to your Vanilla settings.

You can now log in using Wordpress or Vanilla and use both the blog and forum. He also discusses where new users should sign up and warns that it’s a first tutorial and shouldn’t be used on live sites just yet.

While it’s rather technical and fiddley, this is one of the common topics which comes up time and time again over at the Vanilla forums - and one of the popular requests I get. This new guide addresses the second method I discussed earlier this year when one wants to have both a blog and forum running on a site.