After much to’ing and fro’ing over the various Facebook Connect plugins, I decided to sit down and just think about what I was attempting to achieve. It became clear that Facebook should not be attempting to provide an identification service, they should just be holding content… If anything, they should be allowing third party identification services for users login on to Facebook. So I’ve opted to support OpenID for both this blog, and the forums.
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The WordPress blog and bbPress forums are now integrated. Meaning that accounts created on either, will be valid for both applications, and both blog and forums share the same cookie. I ditched phpBB3; it used to be the de facto for all forums, but I’ve grown disillusioned with its apparent bloat, lack of anti-spam features, and still (as of version 3.0.4) no sign of a mature plugin API.
I’ve also added the WordPress Facebook Connect plugin to the blog, and after my small hiatus will probably assess the effort required in porting that plugin to bbPress. It will — of course — be shared with the community if I decide to port it.
There’s been more changes to the web-site, and blog. First off, I’m Lifestreaming again. This time I’m back to Sweetcron, running at http://yibble.org/. This time I’m using a theme which highlights my blog posts, because I don’t want them to be drowned out in the excessive number of Tweets. Then, for further integration, I’m developing a WordPress theme based upon the one that my Sweetcron installation is using, which is teh blog ar (not) dead.
When the WordPress theme is complete, the two site applications will appear to be highly integrated. Punting users back and forth between the two, with very little evidence or interruption to the user experience. The idea is that a Lifestream and a blog can co-exist, without compromise. I don’t have to downgrade features in order to support both forms of web presence. More importantly, I don’t have to depend on external web services to handle blog functions, which is a process that Sweetcron seems to encourage.
Once I’m happy with the state of the new WordPress theme, I’ll create a Subversion repository, so that folks can easily download the latest version. In the meantime, for compliance with the GPL, that the theme is licensed under. I’ll supply the current source code upon individual request. However, I would urge people to be patient, as this theme is far from complete, and I intend to perform plenty of work on it in order to get a version I’m satisfied with in time for February, 2009.

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