WordPress 3.9 Breaks WP-United Theme Integration

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A small break from the traditional content here (but, if you’re a new visitor, please take a look at what I’m currently spending all my money on!)

As part of my role as website administrator for the Ford Anglia 105E Owners Club, I have to deal with updates to the software that runs the site – this namely is WordPress and phpBB.

Having had an existing phpBB forum, and introducing WordPress as the front-end, I wanted to merge the two, both in look & feel, and users, to provide a seamless transition between the forum and website.

To this end, I have utilised WP-United – however, the recent update to WordPress 3.9 has broken this integration, and when the Theme Integration is enabled in “phpBB in WordPress” mode, attempting to browse to any phpBB page results in a plain white screen.

I’ll update this as I find any more information – but wanted to get something out there onto the web so that anyone searching will find, and hopefully any WP-United users can find a solution.

Else, I’ll be looking back towards utilising something like bbPress… although I still don’t think it’s as good for forums as phpBB!

4 thoughts on “WordPress 3.9 Breaks WP-United Theme Integration”

  1. I have been tracing through the loading of WP-United by adding some debug messages, and refreshing the page.

    I am as far as the following line in /phpbb/includes/hooks/hook_wp-united.php before it throws back to a white page:

    [48] require_once($wpUnited->get_plugin_path() . ‘wordpress-runner.php’);

  2. Under the heading of “Run WordPress” in wordpress-runner.php, the following line throws an error, returning us to the white page:

    [54] eval($wpUtdInt->exec());

  3. WP-United creates a cache of the core WordPress settings in /wp-content/plugins/wp-united/cache

    Opening this cache, it does not appear to be properly formatted php.

    Disabling the core cache in /wp-content/plugins/wp-united/options.php gets us through wordpress-runner.php and further into hook_wp-united.php, to here:

    [104] ob_start();

  4. Thanks to nata-lee on the WP-United forum, there is a fix for this:

    Relpace this line:
    file core-patcher.php
    line 273

    $cSet = str_replace('$wp->init()', 'function wpu_deferred_wp_load() { $GLOBALS[\'wp\']->init()', $cSet);

    with this
    $cSet = str_replace('$GLOBALS[\'wp\']->init()', 'function wpu_deferred_wp_load() { $GLOBALS[\'wp\']->init()', $cSet);

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