Earlier today saw the release of these modules. I wrote up the original planned Joomla module, IPC.Joomla, the WordPress module, IPC.WordPress, and an unexpected but welcomed third module for WordPress MU: IPC.WordPress MU. For those of you who don’t have a clue what IP.Converge is or what it does you may be wondering what point I’m trying to make here. IP.Converge is an application offered by IPS free of charge to any customer with a current active support license. It is designed to provide a central location to perform user authentication and management requests  between different web applications. Previous to 1.1, IP.Converge had only seen a select few of IPS applications in its arsenal, but with the most recent update it has become possible to make other applications, such as Joomla, “converge ready”. This is what we have done here, by writing these modules we’ve successfully made Joomla, WordPress and WordPress MU converge ready.

So what does this mean? Any application that you converge will immedaitely begin sharing the same user base. Users from one application can log into the other without creating a second account. New account regisrations will filter over to the other converged applications. Any changes made to a user’s account details will filter over to the other applications and single sign-on is a breeze.

While this is the integration a lot of people have been clamoring for, and for a long while at that, we figured it’d be insane on our part to stop here. After these modules exit out of their development stage and become stable, we will turn our attention to developing additional extension sets for the modules. These extension sets will provide varying levels of integration between two specific products that you have converged. Some of the more popular combinations would of course be IP.Board + Joomla and IP.Board + WordPress (and/or MU). You will be able to choose from the sets available, with the ones targetted at further integration introducing not only user but content integration as well!

I’m pretty excited about this project and I hope a lot of you will find it useful. Please, feel free to try out the BETA versions of the modules available now and post any feedback and suggestions you may have on the IPS company forums.