bbPress.org

I have been tasked with integrating a forum whit an existing site of private community of members already in existence.

I selected bbpress because I like its simplicity and its similarities with wordpress so I am somewhat familiar with it on the surface and to a lesser extent its inner workings. This integration needs to be seamless in both appearance and function.

Geting it visually integrated was easy as I was able to wrap my existing webpage class in a bb template by doing all my setup in head.php and my rendering in footer.php. wrapping my webpage class also inherently provided me with blocking pages and showing the login page if the user wasn’t authenticated to the existing site. so far so good.

Now onto the problem. I need users logged into the site to be able to post and have all the perks of registered users but NOT actually be a user because they will not control their user info from bbpress. avatars names email addresses etc are to be controlled from an existing interface that i have no control over. With that said inserting and updating entires in the bbuesrs table is undesirable for me and I would much rather a plugin be be abel to instantiate the bb_user class using $_SESSION data instead of entries in the database.

I have been able to get this working by hacking the actual bb_user class in combination with a hacked anonymous posting plugin, but I want to be able to update bbpress in the future without breaking it or having to go re-hack so I am hoping to find a pluggable solution.

any ideas?