I was messing around and researching a little today, and I think I’ve discovered the problem I was having with adding the login to the pages to track image filtering settings.

The page I was testing on had the wordpress blurbs at the bottom that you see on the index and the homepage preview.  While login worked perfectly well, logout always failed and gave an error on the forum.

I finally realized that it was a database conflict, because wordpress and the forum have thier own databases.  A little more research has turned up potential variable conflicts between the forum and wordpress, meaning that even if I resolve the database issue, I still may not be able to integrate the WordPress blurbs and the forum login on the same page.

What I’m thinking about doing is hunting around for a plugin that I’ve seen which will send wordpress posts to the forum software that I’m using.  If I can find that functionality, then I can probably use the forum functionality to grab those copies of my news posts from the forum for display, and simply put a blog link in there instead of the permalink to the actual news post.

Truthfully, I don’t like the way it is now anyhow.  It goes to the current post on the blurb, and not to the “top” of the blog.  That’s one of the reasons I hacked in the “Blog Home” link at the top of WordPress.  If I have a top link to the home of the blog, it will take you to the page with the most recent posts, instead of only the last post I’ve made.

That’s something to work on next week.  If that works, then I’ll probably utilize the forum database to store all of my information for the website.  The names I always end up using for things are so ate-up that the odds of a conflict are almost nonexistant.  I use utterly non-conventional names for damn near everything.  They’re perfectly logical to me, but nobody else would ever think of them *laugh*

Never once in the several years of forum modification programming that I engaged in did the very first table name that popped in my head conflict with any other.  Likewise, adding a new field to an existing table never proved an issued.

On that same note, I’ve never had a random series of numbers after my user name on anything since I started using the internet.  My mind simply doesn’t work like anyone else’s, and my default names are never taken, no matter where I go.

I don’t like the method I was going to use to store the settings for image filtering, simply because of the way the modification I installed to the forum handles dropdown settings.  First, it stores them in the dumbest table I’ve ever seen, and stores them in text format.  All I need is a simple 0-3 setting, and it’s storing a buttload of worthless text for every user.

I’ll be using my own table for user settings for the website.  In time, I may become familiar enough with the forum software to integrate them in the member CP as well.  It looks like the forum software is about to undergo a major upgrade to a new version, though.  Experience tells me to not waste my time learning anything about the software when a completely new version is close to beta testing.  As soon as I get everything figured out, the whole kit-n-kaboodle will have changed with the new software.

So, it’s likely that website settings will be separate from forum settings for a while after I get the website up into functionality.  They will share a login, however.  If you’re logged in to the website, you’ll be logged in to the forum.  The website settings simply won’t be available from the forum until I’ve decided that the version of the forum software is stable and unlikely to undergo major changes in the near future.

I’m not really worried about having a different login for wordpress at this point.  Once the forum is up, most people will probably comment there, anyway.  It will give much more functionality than the blog for commenting.

WordPress will stay as my main news page, though.  I spent too much damn time archiving all those ancient “what’s new” pages into this, and I ain’t bloody well doing that again.  Trying to move all of them to the forum simply wouldn’t be logical, because WordPress displays them in a much cleaner fashion than a forum section would.

I’ll probably figure out a way to make the “News” section I’m using to post blurbs on the main site invisible from the forum, actually.  It would be redundant.

In case nobody’s noticed, I tend to ramble.  Half the time when I’m coding, I type up stuff like this just to remind me of what I was planning rather than making a notes file.  If I don’t need specific information that could jeopardize security, it just makes it easier for me to find on a blog or an updates thread or whatever *laugh*