Implementing a (prebuild) Forum

[Hyra]

Hey hey,

I'm in the progress of releasing v2 of my website (artinvolved.com) and sadly noticed I kind of slacked with the development of the forum.

I stayed away from using a prebuilt forum as I felt those packages offer too much functionality i don't need (read: want), but for the sake of development speed I'm currently reevaluating my options.

What a prebuilt forum should offer (me) is:
- Ability to use an external User-database. Too many forum-applications are designed to be used as the foundation of a site. The community behind it expands on the forum and its database. My site is developed the other way around. The forum should be an extension rather than the core.
- Custom templates. Sure, they all offer this. But as I'm looking to integrate custom (php) headers and modules around the forum it should be a tad more advanced.

What i've found so far:
- vBulletin
Pretty straight forward as far as customizing the templates goes. Poor support for external "log in" options. Sure, it's hackable, but that will get messy quickly.

- Invision Power Board
Highly customisable and an advanced CP, but with all kinds of features i don't want. It seems developed as to be the most "core" of them all, with the profile pages of members and the likes; which unfortunately are quite hard to remove. They offer a lot of options, without the option to turn them off. On the other hand, the external log in system is very nice.

- SMF (Simple Machines)
Free. I'm guessing that's a big plus. But quite the same as with vBulletin, hard to get the extra features out.

So .. do i have a question?
I think i do. Does anyone have any experience with "stripping" a forum to it's minimum so it is usuable within an existing website with its own database without having to "hack" through a gazillion files to make it happen.

In addition I have made my own MVC Framework which renders the pages which makes "copy pasting in" a forum problematic, but im willing to sacrifice such for a prebuilt forum to save me some time (as it will run on a seperate subdomain anyway).

I have the know-how to do such a thing, but it's time-consuming, tacky and would probably be very messy in the end.

Any opinions/experiences to share?

 

[Hyra]

Right,

as I'm not the type that waits for a sollution i toyed around a bit more. Accidently found phpBB version 3, which is very wicked.

The source is easy to hack so I can modify/redirect certain areas to mine.

Decided that upon registering a user i'll just make a dupe-user in the forum database with matching ID's.

Already got the external log in and user creation working and the templates are pretty straight forward.

So .. there you have it. Found my own sollution. If anyone else is looking for an easy to "integrate" forum within an existing website, do check out phpBB3.

 

[sOliver]

Right,

as I'm not the type that waits for a sollution i toyed around a bit more. Accidently found phpBB version 3, which is very wicked.

The source is easy to hack so I can modify/redirect certain areas to mine.

Decided that upon registering a user i'll just make a dupe-user in the forum database with matching ID's.

Already got the external log in and user creation working and the templates are pretty straight forward.

So .. there you have it. Found my own sollution. If anyone else is looking for an easy to "integrate" forum within an existing website, do check out phpBB3.

Was going to recommend you phpBB3 too .. I love it, although I don't like that proSilver template that much.
I'm impressed that you implemented an external login and user creation so fast.

I'm using phpbb3 in combination with joomla .. it's pretty tough to synchronize both so that you can login at the joomla site and at the forum at the same time, so I just made two sites. My experience is that users who really want to submit articles or other stuff will register at both sites.

 

[Hyra]

Well as the forum is more of an extension to the site i wanted to avoid double regs/logins at all costs.

The login/user creation wasn't all that difficult as phpBB3 (in contrast to phpBB2) has a better framework. I just followed the trail of the registration process to find out where the "magic happens" and went from there.

Same for logging in.

The fact i made an external login by just using one line is worrying me just a little bit as it seems a bit unsecure if it works this way. But then again, i trust the people over there know what they're doing

Most extra work will be tweaking the templates, as indeed, the prosilver one is a bit weird.