Using Wordpress and SMF forum together

[~kev~]

The way I see it - if you have a forum there is no reason to allow comments on your wesite or blog articles.

Using a forum like SMF or mybb for your commenting system is a lot better then using the wordpress commenting system. People can post images and videos a lot easier in SMF, as compared to the wordpress comments.

Members only need one log in since SMF and Wordpress are not bridged. Because there is no way for members to comment on the articles directly, there is no reason for them to log into wordpress. Bridges can sometimes break things when you upgrade one side or the other, so not having a bridge fixes that problem as well. I have had some bad experiences with bridges and am trying to stay away from them.

Wordpress has a comment system built in, this is default and I do not know of a way to fully remove it. All you can really do it turn it off. But if comments are turned off then at the bottom of every article there is a message "comments have been disabled". If you are using Wordpress as a website, or a landing page, the "comments have been disabled" message just looks tacky.

So what I did, I edited the wordpress page templates and removed the code for the comments. The part that says "comments have been disabled" was also removed. Even if comments were enabled, nothing would show up on the page, because all references were removed from the templates. This also stops those pesky wordpress spam bots dead in their tracks.

Write up an article for your website (or landing page) and publish it. Go to the forums and start a thread. I usually provide a link to the article in the thread and state that "this thread is for the discussion of article ABC." Copy the address to the thread.

Go back to the article and edit it. On the very last line, put a comment and a link. Most of the time I will say something like - "If you wish to comment on this article, then visit this thread in the forums." So the thread and the article are linked together.

Edit the wordpress and smf themes so they look as close alike as possible. But a lot of times they will not look exact.

Example:

Wordpress webpage - http://www.fortresstraining.com/
SMF forum - http://www.fortresstraining.com/forum/


SMF and Wordpress share the same database, so backing up is a one touch operation.

SMF is installed as a /forum folder under wordpress. So when I back up the whole site, I just download the entire HTML directory.

Wordpress also has some excellent built in Search Engine Optimization features. When these are tweaked, wordpress sites can get some good rankings in google results pages.

Wordpress does not take up a lot of server resources, as compared to "other" content management systems.

The website I linked to above is the first time I have tried this. Currently I have two more sites waiting for this same exact type of set up. But one of the draw backs, its takes a lot of time to tweak the themes between Wordpress and SMF so they look alike.

[manik]

don't you think two sites would make it tough for users? if they like to read more articles they have to go to the article blog again. just my thoughts.

[~kev~]

don't you think two sites would make it tough for users? if they like to read more articles they have to go to the article blog again. just my thoughts.

Two sites? Not quit sure I understand? The forums are under the same domain name as the forum.

I have playing around with the idea for several months. One of of my blogs / forum portals I had disabled comments a long time ago and had edited the templates to remove the comments area. So when my son asked for a website, I did his the same way. To him, not only does he have forum, but he has a whole website!!! Even though its built with blogging software, it dont matter to him.

Also, while looking through sitepoint over the weekend I found where one of their article writers had done the same exact thing. He published at article, closed the comments and started a thread in the forum.

[manik]

oh guess I misunderstood then. your son must be happy

[krates98]

how did you shared the DB'S ?

[~kev~]

how did you shared the DB'S ?

Yes, to make backing up the database easier, both sites share the same database.