FWIW, I'm interested in this topic as well. I'm planning on creating exactly this sort of integration, and phpBB looks like a good tool to use. One thing I'll be creating is a linked search - the results on the wiki will include a forum search, and vice versa.

- MHart - http://taxalmanac.org

----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt England" mengland@mengland.net To: "Julian Rendell" wandering.womble@gmail.com; "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list" mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org Cc: mengland@mengland.net Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 7:47 PM Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Forum software (e.g. phpBB or similar)integration to replace talk pages

I'm not sure if I know the entire context of this thread, however, I'll give my 2 cents:

I think the entire world of discussion management mechanisms (email lists, forums, Usenet newsgroups...and now wiki talk pages) are far too segragated. I believe that underlying designs should have a concept of a "vehicle-independent" conversational/discussion content (the discussion threads) with delivery-specific mechanisms (email and forums and newsgroups, etc).

Unfortunately, hardly anyone or anything does this...and the world goes merrily on with all sorts of segragated conversations about the same things but divided only because one group conversation is a newsgroup, one is a web forum, one is a wiki, and one is a mailing list.

I have been on a short-term mission to find things that bridge the gap, and the only thing I've been successful with thus far is http://mail2forum.com (and its cousin named CM2F) that links email lists (of any flavor, Mailman, ezmlm, majordomo, etc) to phpBB forums. (I tried to get the vBulletin people to do this, but I was inexplicably rebuffed, imho).

I would LOVE to get my MediaWiki site to "bridge" its talk pages into my phpBB forum (and therefore my GNUMailman lists); life would be much easier for my communities (which are currently software development groups behind a firewall).

For the medium term (like 3 months to 2 years) I think this is feasible by doing the mail2forum.com kind of stuff. However, for the long term "delivery agnostic" bridge control of discussions, I was thinking of throwing a site together for a collaboration point for the leaders of all the different tools and asking them to help develop a specification for how to do this...if everyone could manage to buy in to this principle. Who knows, maybe someone else is trying to do this...but I haven't seen it, and I've looked a LONG time.

For now I'm at least trying to leverage mail2forum.com. I anxiously away anything that could integrate MediaWiki talk pages into phpBB as well.

-Matt

At 6/3/2005 04:57 PM, Julian Rendell wrote:

...

Hi there- I've done some searching and seen some mock-ups, and a few hints that people have succeeded, but does anyone have a concrete guide for how to integrate some kind of forum software into mediawiki to replace the talk pages?

Or I guess a second best would be the ability to easily (e.g. via interwiki?) integrate a seperate forum site into mediawiki links, and also an easy way to create wiki-like links in the forum posts that link back to the wiki.

Any suggestions appreciated-

Regards

Julian _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

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-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of Ira Abramov Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 7:10 AM To: mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Re: Forum software (e.g. phpBB or similar)integrationto replace talk pages

Quoting MHart, from the post of Tue, 07 Jun:

...

FWIW, I'm interested in this topic as well. I'm planning on creating exactly this sort of integration, and phpBB looks like a good

tool to use.

...

One thing I'll be creating is a linked search - the results on the wiki will include a forum search, and vice versa.

If you could, please consider a product with a better track record of security holes... phpBB keeps popping holes way too often.

Where do we upload our custom plugin adapters? I want to go ahead and upload what I wrote for vBulletinBoard, if for no other reason than to dissuade people from using something risky like phpBB,

Hello,

i have come to this thread after having being pointed by an user asking for this feature and wanting to show me the amount of people asking for this.

I have just completed the release of CM2F Groups 1.0 PReview, and i am hunting for new features to be included.

One that has been implemented is, the Forum2Forum feature where you can bridge 2 forums together.

The other one that i am working on is to finish the port to Vbulletin and Xoops NewBB. This task is taking more time, because of the complexity. I have been able to have the integration, but it is still making errors, and the admin interface is being hard to port.

So i will start to look into MediaWiki and see what could come out...

Regards, D.

For what it's worth, I see 2 problems attempting to be solved when one mentions MediaWiki "integration" with phpBB (or any other forum software):

1) Provide a common login and password for each use for each mechanism (wiki and forum).

2) Make talk pages automatically reference forum thread-topics.

Muzaffer, you do not appear to be addressing goal #2. Are you attempting goald #1, or something else? If #1, could you make MediaWiki and phpBB both be clients to an LDAP database?

If something else...can you explain further what purpose you attempt to solve and/or what you want the end result to be? I'm unclear on this point.

-Matt

At 6/3/2005 08:17 PM, Muzaffer Ozakca wrote:

I've been trying to integrate phpBB with mediawiki. But I'm not trying to tie talk pages to forums.

I made some progress... towards a mess. I looked at phpBB, smf, useBB, and some others. The thing is their codes are very similar, they all keep a sessions table to show who is logged in, etc. There are other simpler ones, too. Compared to MW, they might be good cases for bad software design and coding.

Here's what I got.

== When a user is created in MW, user tables of phpBB are updated. Basically a user with the same user name is added to the phpbb user table. == phpBB checks mediawiki cookies and makes the user in the MW cookie log in automatically by setting some internal structures. Of course, sessions are not easily sharable so there are problems here. For example, if a session expires for a user, cookies will still be there.

There might be security issues, too. I'm not planning to integrate it fully into MW code, I will put phpBB in a resizable frame on a wiki page. Then make it look like monobook by playing with layout and css. I took a similar approach -iframes- for an event calendar that works somewhat OK.

As I said, my goal is not replacing talk pages but give my users a separate forum.

Julian Rendell wrote:

...

Hi there- I've done some searching and seen some mock-ups, and a few hints that people have succeeded, but does anyone have a concrete guide for how to integrate some kind of forum software into mediawiki to replace the talk pages? Or I guess a second best would be the ability to easily (e.g. via interwiki?) integrate a seperate forum site into mediawiki links, and also an easy way to create wiki-like links in the forum posts that link back to the wiki. Any suggestions appreciated- Regards Julian _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

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Carlton B wrote:

...

For what it's worth, I see 2 problems attempting to be solved when one mentions MediaWiki "integration" with phpBB (or any other forum software):

1. Provide a common login and password for each use for each mechanism

(wiki and forum).

2. Make talk pages automatically reference forum thread-topics.

Muzaffer, you do not appear to be addressing goal #2. Are you attempting goald #1, or something else? If #1, could you make MediaWiki and phpBB both be clients to an LDAP database?

If something else...can you explain further what purpose you attempt to solve and/or what you want the end result to be? I'm unclear on this point.

I'm not trying to solve point 2. I think it'd be a major undertaking. The site I'm building will be for a small community so I'm not expecting much discussion about the wiki pages.

However, he's trying to solve a third integration problem. He not only wants to share login *credentials* between applications, he also wants to share login *state*. Most web packages including MW and forums store the state on the client in the form of cookies, because HTTP is a stateless protocol. Thus, if you want to share state, both applications must be able to get and set each other's cookies. Since (for example) phpBB's cookie contains attributes that are only interesting to phpBB, but your MW would somehow need to obtain these uninteresting values and write them into a

Yes, this is the point, log in only once and use all tools attached as that user. Making people login several times would be a turn-off for most users or so I believe. So, my wiki knows not much about other tools, except that when a new account is created, an account for the forum software is created. I made most changes in the phpBB code, it just reads MW cookies and not phpBB's. Most user parameters are kept in the phpbb database which are loaded everytime so I don't have to worry about cookies. If I could get this to work, I'll put it in an iframe with dynamic resizing.

phpBB cookie. To my knowledge, none of the applications involved have encapsulated their security tokens or cookie strategy in a way that is open to extension... therefore you must crack them open to modify them, and accept the possibility of having to rewrite the modules every time they are upgraded.

Keeping things up to date will be a hassle. I hope there won't be major updates to phpBB. That's why I decided to go with a mature app like phpbb rather than some other simpler -and nicer- ones. Actually there are things I didn't like about phpBB such as its flat forum style.

I think another legit question would be why use a wiki as a community site. This is more like an experiment on the community itself so phpnuke, etc. wouldn't be interesting enough.

I decided early on that I wasn't interested in that kind of self-torture.

If there were php libraries to encapsulate session and cookie management, I think it would be much easier to code in php. Modifying somebody else's badly written code should be made against programmer rights and a major offense :)

I agree that talk pages are not good as forums but I think the rationale was what could be done with the code already written. A very simple forum would be a good choice instead of talk pages.

-Carlton

I agree with this. I have more thoughts on the matter than I have time to write at this exact moment. The group edit paradigm is good for articles, but bad for discussion. In articles, the integrity of the individual's voice is secondary except to isolate vandalism. In discussions, the integrity of the individual's voice is the whole point.

On casual inspection, Wikimedia seems to do OK in preserving the individual's voice on the talk pages... but that's just casual inspection. If participants are actively monitoring their own words for edits, they can enforce the integrity of their own words, but if not, it's open to misrepresentation. You can't really know that without inspecting every diff of the talk page. That's too much to demand of a user and does not encourage discussion. Thus, discussions should be threaded.

If I had infinite time to put into MW, I might try something like mapping each category to a forum, and each MW article name to a thread title. If they chose, users could view MW as a forum skin, seeing only the talk pages and doing nothing but "talking" if they choose. This would encourage non-adversarial discussion, which I think would be a better method of information discovery than the currently prevalent adversarial mode.

-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of Lee Daniel Crocker Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 11:32 AM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Yes! Replace talk pages!

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 20:17 -0500, Muzaffer Ozakca wrote:

...

As I said, my goal is not replacing talk pages but give my users a separate forum.

I think replacing talk pages altogether is a much better goal. Matt's right--there's too much disorganized data out there that needs to be integrated into something simpler and with better connections. The choice of how a user interacts with a discussion should be decoupled from the choices of what to discuss and with whom; we should be able to choose a group and a topic first, then use whatever software we're comfortable with to participate.

Wiki pages shouldn't have associated talk /pages/, they should have associated /forums/, where the comments are are stored by date with proper source ID, so that user's can do things like "show me all comments from user X, whom I respect", "killfile idiot Z", "show me comments within this date range", and so on. These could also be gatewayed to/from email lists or usenet groups to which users could subscribe or unsubscribe at will (by adding the forum to their watchlist, for example). Maybe even IRC talks could be integrated somehow.

It would be good to integrate the software, so that it would share a common feel and flow (i.e., "discuss" button on the page leads to the forum, the forum had features for including page text to comment on, and so forth). I don't think that would be easy with a third party tool like phpbb; but maybe it could be hacked.

-- Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

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On Sat, 2005-06-04 at 02:47 +0000, Dori wrote:

...

I think replacing talk pages altogether is a much better goal.

I disagree. The talk pages are not just used for discussions. Most of them are used for discussions (or not used at all), but some also hold metadata, some structures, etc.

Then let's find more appropriate places for those things as well. I'm not suggesting we get rid of functionality; I'm suggesting we get rid of a particular piece of software and replace it with one that is simpler and has more functionality.

er hi...(gee this forum's font is small) well i've been using phpbb for a long time cuz it easy mod & make nicer themes than other BB. however, i've been toying with the idea of "bridging" with other components. this namely phpbb since i use it. i did wonder about a wiki. knowing wikimedia's systems r d best around i've been hunting down the patch/hack/bridge wtver...does it exist? if it does plz contact me! via this email i have here! cuz so far i've used a Coppermine to phpBB bridge n am modding my templates to exactly match...perhaps if the way was paved for Wikimedia to be modding as such. well...the goes the neighbourhood!

CONTACT ME ANYONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO BRIDGE PHPBB+WIKIMEDIA!