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