• phpBB Fetch All 2.0.4 or later
• Insert Post
• My own integration script (install it into the forum's top-level directory)

Note that you can call the table and columns whatever you want (in case the default names step on your SQL implementation), but make sure to change the respective settings at the top of integrate.inc if you do.

Create a place for threads to be put.

Optionally, create a posting bot user, which will be what creates all of the threads (it's nice to keep it separate from your own account for a number of reasons). It doesn't actually have to have administrative access, since the thread creation stuff bypasses it nicely; this weblog's forumbot doesn't even have logins enabled (accomplished by setting "user is active" to "no" from the user administration page).

Prepare your weblog for accessing phpBB.

At the very top of each page template (even before the <DOCTYPE> tag if you have it) you need to put code which looks something like this:

<?php
$phpbb_root_path = "[relative path to phpBB]";
include($phpbb_root_path . 'integrate.inc');
include($phpbb_root_path . 'mods/phpbb_fetch_all/common.' . $phpEx);
include($phpbb_root_path . 'mods/phpbb_fetch_all/posts.' . $phpEx);
include($phpbb_root_path . 'mods/phpbb_fetch_all/users.' . $phpEx);

$display_userdata = session_pagestart($user_ip, PAGE_INDEX);
init_userprefs($display_userdata);
?>

That bit which says [relative path to phpBB] needs to be replaced with the actual relative path to phpBB. The relative path is the way you get from one place to another without any known fixed reference point. The way you determine the relative path is fairly simple:

• Start out totally empty
• For each directory you have to go up, add ../
• For each directory you have to go down, add its name ending with a /

Another common configuration is where you have the weblog as the top-level directory for your site and the forum directly beneath it (for example, http://foo.bar/ for the weblog and http://foo.bar/forum/ for phpBB). In this case, the relative path from the top-level directory would just be "forum/". Note that a relative path never begins with a /.

Get MT to create phpBB threads as needed.

Note that you can change the format of the message as much as you like, but the content will be set in stone (barring manual editing later) once the thread is created. There's no easy way to rebuild the first post on each thread right now (and any way which would come later would still be horrible and kludgy), so be sure you're happy with the format now.

Also note that this format (with <a href> instead of that [url] crap) might not work if you haven't configured phpBB to allow the A tag in posts. [url] sucks for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it forces target="_blank" which, especially in this case, makes the integration between the weblog and the forum very annoying.

Also, that code isn't quite finished yet; notice the FORUM_ID, BOT_ID and USER_ID? The first one is the ID of the forum which posts go into, the second is user ID of the posting bot, and the last one is your user ID (so that you'll be emailed notifications to comment posts). (To get the user ID, look at their entry on the member list. For example, my ID is 2, which you can see by looking at the URL.)

Finally, that code above sets the thread creation time to the time when the PHP script runs, rather than the time of the weblog entry. It's simpler than trying to account for timezone issues and clock skew and so on, and it's not as if the thread creation time will be visible on the weblog entry anyway, so there's no point in really worrying about it. (I did for a while and all it caused was headaches.)

Change your comment display and form.

So, the first thing you want to do is back up your templates, because we're about to change them a whole bunch.

Done with that? Good!

This comment engine is incompatible with the popup-based comment viewing thing. But that's okay, because the popup-based comment viewing thing is an absolutely atrocious user interface for quite a few reasons which I won't get into. But, this means that you need all comments to happen on the individual entry archive listings, which means that permalinks must point to it. So, change your weblog configuration to have "individual entry archive" as the default permalink destination.

Go to the individual archive template and replace your entire comment listing and posting form with this ugly garbage, adjusted for your own CSS: (this isn't exactly what I do — I put a lot of the functionality into a PHP include file — but it's a good starting point)

The summary is that basically you're replacing everything inside <MTEntryIfCommentsOpen>...</MTEntryIfCommentsOpen> (including the tags) with that php function, which prints out the php thread and provides a link for posting a comment. You still want to keep the old comment display (you don't want to throw out all of those old comments, right?) but don't want to keep the old comment form.

You may notice that there's no new comment form, and just a link to the reply page. It's possible to get a full comment form in there, but it's a bit of work and it makes registered users a LOT harder to deal with. It also makes it much easier for spammers to spam. However, if you really want it, HexAngel has written up how to add a comment form to the page.

So, as soon as you rebuild the site, you should be using phpBB for all new comments. Post a test comment, and remove or otherwise disable mt-comments.cgi (otherwise scripts can still post to your entries).

The rest of this is just icing.

Get the correct comment counts.

Recent discussion list

<?
    $sql = "SELECT t.topic_title, i.source, t.topic_replies, t.topic_id, i.url FROM " .
        TOPICS_TABLE . " as t, " .
        POSTS_TABLE . " as p, " .
        INTEGRATE_TABLE . " as i " .
        "WHERE t.forum_id = 11 AND t.topic_last_post_id = p.post_id
                     AND t.topic_replies > 0 AND t.topic_id = i.topic
                     ORDER BY t.topic_type DESC, p.post_time DESC LIMIT $lastn";
    $result = $db->sql_query($sql);
    while (($row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result)))
    {
        $numcomments = $row['topic_replies'];
        $link = $row['url']?$row['url']:sprintf("<$MTArchiveURL$>/%06d.php?comments=$numcomments",
                   substr($row['source'], 3));
        $title = $row['topic_title'];
        if (strlen($title) > 30)
                $title = substr($title, 0, 28) . "…";
        echo "<li><a href=\"$link\">" .
                $title . "</a> (" .
                $numcomments . 
                ")</li>\n";
    }
?>

Also note that this will not work if you use permalink URLs which are different than the MovableType default of e.g. 000123.php. In the future I may fix this behavior if so requested.

Rebuild your site.

If not, well, feel free to post a comment here, because my installation actually works. ;)

Care and Feeding

If you missed this step above, you should definitely remove or disable mt-comments.cgi; otherwise spammers will still be able to spam your entries, and what's worse is the spam will appear above all legitimate comments.

If you want to back up your phpBB database (for migration to another server or for safety or whatever), it's better to just use a raw SQL dump, because the phpBB backup/restore process doesn't always restore all of the necessary data. If you do use the built-in database backup mechanism, make sure to put "integrate" (or whatever you named your table) into the custom table list. (Otherwise none of your threads will be associated to your weblog entries anymore, and all-new empty threads will be created.)

If you change your archive permalinks, you'll probably want the 'url' table column to get updated. If so, just uncomment the line in GetMessage (in integrate.inc) which comes right before // Thread already exists, yay!. After a while you'll probably want to re-comment it, though.

Then the next time the page is viewed, the permalink column will be updated, so things like the recent discussion list and so on will use the new URL. (This won't update the permalink in the forum bot's post, however. Also it will incur a bit more of a hit on your database, though the actual performance impact is probably minimal.)

Some extra hints/tips

• Write a robots.txt site for your file which looks something like this:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /forum/posting.php
  Disallow: /forum/profile.php
  Disallow: /forum/memberlist.php

  This will prevent spammers from finding your forum (via Google or other search engines) as a place for easy registrations (since even incactive registrations can still be used to spam links onto your memberlist).
• For even tighter protection against spam registrations, try a couple of simple mods (which prevent the use of the member list as a link farm).
• Also, there are phpBB spambots now, so stop those guys dead too.
• Don't just use my boilerplate code! Learn how to interface with phpbb_fetch_all in order to get more niftier stuff going. Like, adding in avatar icons and session stuff (like with my login/logout/register links here), polls, or whatever! This code is just a starting point, just as the default MovableType templates aren't intended to be the final look and feel of your weblog. You've probably spent a lot of time customizing your MT display, so why stick to the basics for phpBB-MT integration?
• Put commonly-used code into a PHP include file. It makes maintenance a lot easier, and also lets mod_php do some bytecode caching and so on. (I won't go into detail about this step, since hopefully by the time you get to this point you'll have enough basic skills with PHP to simply look at that file and figure out what needs to be done.)