WordPress MU

I have an active phpbb forum community which would love blogs and I want to offer them wpmu.

I've investigated phpbb wpmu integration tools and conclude there's nothing commonly used and an increasing tendancy towards the bbpress forum. I like phpbb and currently have no plan to switch to bbpress.

I've never had a blog (except basic test) and currently have no personal desire to create one. I therefore have little idea about the basics of running a blog or being part of a blog community.

I wonder (and ask you the bloggers) should I be concerned about conflict or duplication of any services running phpbb & wpmu on the same site? Or are these services completely separate (e.g. comments and posts etc.)? Without integration users will of course require and maintain two separate memberships.

thank you

to clarify, i understand the basic technical functions of the blog, but not having ever blogged, I don't understand what it's like to blog and wonder if phpbb & wpmu can coexist and compliment or is there some clash (given that they are not integrated and contain a few somewhat similar functions)

Consider reading a discussion on how to write a novel to actually reading the novel. We use our forum to discuss issues related to the blogs, how tos, creativity, rants, you name it.

WPMU has a myriad of ways of pointing/pulling to/from your forums.

I use a link at the bottom of every blog's theme footer to direct traffic to the forum.

I use widgets in WPMU to post content from forums on blog pages.

WPMU text widgets can be filled with anything you could imagine related to your forums.

Certain forum RSS feeds can be visible only to blog admins via their "dashboard".

Each user can "out of the box" be set up with 10 RSS feeds in their blog's sidebars.

phpbb themes/mods have ways of pulling in outside RSS into a block or allowing separate RSS for every topic, surely.(I switched from phpbb to punbb for the easy(many) RSS feeds last year, my next switch will likely be to bbpress, however).

Themes for WPMU are easy-peezy and come in zillions of shapes and sizes.

Users will have to update the forum profiles themselves to link to their blogs.

I wonder if you could get a WPMU trackback to appear in a designated phpbb forum topic? People would write a WPMU post, having been inspired by something in the forum, and that topic in the forum would automagically receive an entry from the person's blog.

sounds like i've not got a problem with conflict but in fact a myriad of integration options - sounds great!

thanks

And usually when people are talking about integration between soemthing liek MU and a forum, all they really mean at the outset is sharing user data. The functions all remain independant of each program. unless, as noted above, you really wanna rock their socks. :)

i do wanna rock their socks with data sharing integration but don't have the know how. i'd love to see it in a plug-in but there isn't one and there's lot of talk about moving to bbpress (so it doesn't sound like anything will be coming).
thanks andrea_r