So my first step in “getting serious” has taken place. I have moved one of my more pet like projects to a separate host and installed a blog. The site has always been a forum, and for the last couple of years it has been a vbulletin forum, and of course I had to use Wordpress for the blog. I tried Vblogetinw when it was active, and I just can’t seem to justify the cash to go with VB Blog, and then on top of all of that I KNOW Wordpress.

So anyway, I had to find a way to integrate WP and VB nicely, and this is where the Bridge comes in. It is a plugin I found over at VB.org and it works great. I had a couple of problems getting it to work on my production site (I tested it with new installations first) but if I wasn’t so cocky after my tests I would have read the FAQ and realized the problems.

I am having one more problem with it, but I am not sure if it is going to be an issue. I had to manually give myself, my forum self, access to the dashboard. When I looked at the MySQL it seemed that there was something amiss with the way the plugin maps the roles. But it is only a small thing and I will be doing more of this backend stuff after I upgrade to vb3.7.

The next issue was to get a decent theme on there. I decided to go with Sandpress, it is a nice theme and I think it will work out great until I decide to start one from scratch using the Sandbox theme as a jumping point. I am still not that great at CSS so it took me a bit to get the right logo on there. I still have a bit of work to get everything looking right but I have to get more content on there and then traffic. THEN I will worry about the sidebars

The only thing that I have done that is interesting is that I have added Gravatar support using the WP-Gravatar plugin. So far it is working great, I just need to add a “cooler” avatar for myself.

If you want to see for yourself what it looks like now, check out HoserNews