Integrate a forum into wordpress site

Question

I have a wordpress site, which is running fine. Beside that site, I have a forum www.mywordpresssite.com/forum running. Now I want to integrate this forum (phpbb) into my wordpress site.

What I would like to do is adding a menuitem called forum, and link this to a file called forum.php, with following content:

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id="content"><!-- if it's not in the header, that is... -->
<iframe src="http://www.mywordpressite.com/forum" width="100%" height="80%" />
</div>

<?php get_footer() ?>

This way, I suppose I can preserve my header & footer from my wordpress site en between them, my forum can be displayed.

My question: how can I call this file forum.php? I created the file and put it in the theme directory.

Answer 1

Use bbPress. It has a fully-built backend, and allows you to assign specific users to moderate the forum, and not access the rest of the website. It's the quickest, easiest, and probably most secure solution.

Answer 2

You can use this file as custom template file. http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Page_Templates

Create a page for your menuentry and use your custom template file for this page.

Answer 3

If you still intend to go ahead with phpBB, then an easier approach would be to customize the templates of phpBB.

Assuming you are using the default set of templates (or any of the basic level templates such as Afterburner, et al), then you should be easily able to find the phpBB theme files (overall_header.html and overall_footer.html).

Edit these two files and put your header and footer code in there.