Recently I was asked to create a forum for our teachers to use to communicate with their students. As a few ofd our teachers are currently using WordPress to post their blogs we decided to find a web2 forum system that would integrate well with WordPress. I have previously used and like Simple Machine Forum (SMF), so I decided to see if WordPress and SMF would play nicely together.

My first result was the WP & SMF plug-in for WordPress. This plug-in once installed, allows you to create users in WordPress and have them automatically populated into your SMF user database. The plug-in also comes with three functions to allow you to show the following information inside WordPress:

1. The last SMF forum posts,
2. The last SMF forum topics,
3. The last SMF forum members,
4. SMF forum statistics; otal Members, Total Posts, Total Topics, Total Categories, Total Board, etc.

The WP & SMF plugin was relatively easy, although I did run into one error which was easily resolved. I will post the installation procedure and the resolution to the issue I encountered soon…

WordPress MU: http://mu.wordpress.org
SMF: http://www.simplemachines.org