General Installation and Integration Questions

[RubiconCSL]

Hi and first if all, thank you for this work you've done. You must have sunk one heck of a lot of hours into this over the years!

What I'm trying to do.
Apologies if this is a long post, but it may help other people.
My phpBB board has been running now for about 15 years. I want to wrap it in a WP site, so I can add more content and use what WP is good at. I don't want to migrate the phpBB forum to a WP forum, because

1. I like phpBB.
2. I don't want to lose 15 years to Search Engine placement and have to start all over again.
3. Users may have got so used to the forum as is, that I may lose some if I migrate it all somewhere else.

Setup
My forum is located in a sub-directory of the main domain: /forum. I was thinking the WP site will be in the root directory and the forum remain where it is. So both will be in the same domain: -

• WP Site: https://thepompeychimes.net
• Forum: https://thepompeychimes.net/forum

Currently, I have a redirect, that redirects https://thepompeychimes.net to https://thepompeychimes.net/forum. When I eventually have the WP site up and running, I should in theory just need to remove the redirect.

I have a few questions though.

1. Installation
I've been looking around the various help pages, but am still a little confused. I'm not 100% sure on how this installs. Is it just a phpBB extension, or is there also a WP plugin (I'm assuming there must be)? If both, I'm not clear on what order they are installed (or if in fact it matters). Is there a very simple step-by-step guide to installing this?

Dev / Live
Whilst I develop the WP site, I have installed it in a staging sub-domain. If I do the installation, should I do this from a copy of the live phpBB forum, or to the live forum? If I do it to a copy of the forum, what issues could there be when I move the WP site live? What happens to any users that may have registered in the live forum since I copied it to the staging sub-domain? Would it be prudent to copy the phpBB forum to the sub-domain anyway, just so I can test the whole process and then start from scratch again?

2. phpBB Forum Access
Once it is all installed and integrated, can the phpBB forum still be run independently, or does it have to always be integrated in the WP site? So, in my example, can the phpBB forum still run directly from https://thepompeychimes.net/forum?

3. Integration
Is the phpBB forum always integrated using an iFrame, or does any WP plugin retrieve the information and display it? If (as I'm assuming) it is all in iFrames, does this mean existing Search Engine indexing will remain the same. If so, how do I redirect any traffic form a search engine to a specific forum thread, such that the WP site loads and the requested thread is loaded in the iFrame? I really don't want to screw up the Search Engine indexing that has taken so many years to get to where it is now!

4. Examples
Are there any example sites I can see where this is all installed? Is there any "showcase" area listing such sites? I'm assuming after 15 years, this must have been used in a lot of sites. In fact, as phpBB is so much better than the WP forum offerings, I'd assume a lot of people use this from day one on there WP sites.

Again, apologies for the length of the post, but unless I am singularly stupid useless confused, answers to this could help other people too.

Many thanks.

[axew3]

Hello, i will try to explain in short any point:

1) You can use the integration WP phpBB plugin as standalone, but also the phpBB WP extension as standalone.
No problem the time you install them, or if you install or not the one or the other.
Into an integration scenario, if you leave users to register into phpBB also (or only), then you'll use the phpBB extension together with the WP plugin.

2) phpBB and WP will follow to run as standalone. So yes, they will follow as ever, the unique thing that happen is that when users register in WP, they are added into phpBB also and when they update password or email or url it will be updated into the linked cms.
Nothing except the password, that is not recognized in WP if the plugin will be uninstalled (so affected users will have to reset the pass, because hashed in phpBB way) change in wordpress. Nothing into phpBB.
You can return any moment with no problem to an non integrated scenario. Just uninstall or deactivate the plugin and/or the phpBB extension if used.

3) the WP plugin come himself with all about widgets or shortcodes, you have to activate and follow inline hints.
You can also not use the iframe integration if you do not want.i
Anyway it is totally seo friendly because Bots just follows and see only real phpBB links and not javascript code that you'll add into two phpBB template files if doing the iframe integration.

Take a look into this and just post if still any question, but be smooth and peaceful, just follow instructions:
https://www.axew3.com/w3/wordpress-phpb ... n-install/

About example sites: there are really many downloads i think 60000 and more, but only 600 installations. Do not know how many are using this, i follow several sites and installed into many on fly in the past. I assume are really more than 600. It is easy code that can be easily changed by anyone. Maybe you can find some of them may following reviews at wp.org or in some post or reply here or at wp.org.

Post if any trouble or more questions!