Capacity / Wordpress Integration Theme

[Ken Vermette]

> phpBB might be a bit more problematic here, as we need to do a major
> update to that.
> That is stuck waiting for the Identity overhaul though, as newer
> versions of phpBB have support for OAuth authentication flows.

It more/less depends if the theming system has changed from whatever
we're running now to whatever is current, and from my previous
experience phpBB is generally decent at not breaking things. Either
way, is there a schedule for the phpBB update, or is it just something
on the radar? It might be a good idea to try to synchronize any look
and feel updates with a major version bump.

> From what I recall of others discussing it, Mediawiki themes are not
> fun to write.

I have heard this also, which is why I imagine you don't see a whole
lot of variety there. I'm tempted to say "when I looked it didn't seem
that bad" but at the same time Murphy's law will rear its ugly head if
I stick tot hat statement. Luckily, we don't need to start from
scratch; I've found a couple themes which seem to have similar basic
designs while also being responsive, such as 'metrolook'. Neverland
also holds up on a technical level. I also like the idea of simply
basing off Neverland simply so the layout doesn't changed for
experienced wiki users, they'll just get the header/footer update and
fresh paint.

> My big question here, before we start talking about technical details
> is how much control Wordpress has over the theming, considering for
> phpBB at least I know the various sub-elements on the page are all
> individual templates. How does this work?
>
> I'm also not sure how much modification phpBB / Mediawiki would need
> to support such integration? Code modifications have bitten us quite
> hard with the Forum and have done so in the past with Bugzilla as
> well.

In terms of modification, as long as I stick to the same principles as
CapacityPress, Wordpress Integration should be limited to the theme
level. I think, worst case, we will need a hardcoded config file
instead of a pretty softcoded solution. The moment we have control of
the header and footer in a PHP environment we have all the control we
need to integrate Wordpress. The only thing it makes this hard on is
for things like PlanetKDE which don't use PHP...

On an aside, caching has turned out to be a sticking point. Before I
started testing I had forgotten that caching solutions modify
wp_settings, which we can't use as an integration point for various
reasons. So it looks like we'll need to use the CapacityPress plugin I
had mentioned to perform the caching for us, so I need to write a
caching solution inside that.

As one last update; in my test installation with CapacityPress running
it will correctly display all release announcements, all applications
and categories, and all text general pages. Additionally, all pages
with translations (announcements, mainly) correctly display
translations in content. Lastly, CapacityPress will locate CSS files
to accompany pages when in integration mode, and will insert them via
the Wordpress APIs, meaning Capcity pages which do need special
attention are very easy to non-destructively style.

I'm going to get the last couple minor integration points required on
the Capacity-side squared away (e.g. it's not properly integrating
Capacity sidebars into Wordpress sidebars) and then I'll be sending up
the Capacity patches for review, I think this should be done in the
next few days. The patches will be inert until we make the appropriate
config update. After that I'll finish up the Wordpress plugin caching
and I think we'll be at the point where we can install Wordpress,
configure the homepage, and launch the next big site upgrade. Would
anybody be willing to get a Wordpress installation running on KDE.org?
We'd want it directly in /trunk/www/sites/www/, but without overriding
the index.php and .htaccess files so we don't disrupt the site. This
should let us use the wp-admin panel to begin installing the necessary
plugins and get things like KIdentity accounts working on it.