After having used WordPress and phpBB separately for some time, the need to combine them did not happen until recently. Considering the popularity of the two, you would think that there would be an easy way to glue them together already.

This does not seem to be the case.

This was a shock to me, but the worst part is that this has been an issue for a long time.

While the best method of adding a forum to WordPress is just to use bbPress,  this is not an option for those that built up a forum before they decided that they wanted to blog. Sure there are many ways for you to have a listing of the most recent posts from a forum in your sidebar, but it is a limited solution and still requires your users to log in more than once. Another approach to consider would be something like OpenID, but while the login would be the same it would still work like two houses sitting next to each other with the same door key.

I will admit right now that I could not write anything in PHP if my life depended on it. I have only slightly tweaked existing code so I do not know if this is as difficult as it seems to be for developers or if the demand for combining the two is just very low.  The lack of options just makes me a little sad that their is not any easy button for this problem.

Maybe you have had better luck with this than I have. If you have a fix for this would you let me know?