[Mediawiki-l] Forum software (e.g. phpBB or similar) integration to replace talk pages

Sat Jun 4 01:17:05 UTC 2005

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
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