Joomla! Discussion Forums

Hello everyone - I have a project I need some advice on. At work I've been developing pages with joomla for the last 4 months and become very familiar with the philosophy and approach to the code.  As a hobby I do technical work for a site that is built around vbulletin 3.0 and using a portal solution for that platform which pales in comparison to Joomla in terms of power and flexiablity.  I'm rebuilding the site and I want to use vbulletin 3.6 to handle the forum issues only and let Joomla 1.5 handle the rest.  This site isn't due for production for at least 3 months, more probably 6 months so I'm presuming 1.5 final will be out by the time this is ready for launch.

The requirements set upon me by the owner of the site is that if you are logged into the forum you are logged into joomla's frontend as well. The administrator parts do not need merger.

I have installed joomla 1.5 into a dev database of the site and it's tables clicked in quietly enough and without incident.  Now, at run time, vbulletin can see joomla's tables and vice-versa.

The approach I'm considering is to turn off user registration in joomla and let vbulletin handle user processing. To do this I need a script that will copy vbulletin's user table (which has around 32,000 entries for this site - did I mention this thing was pretty big though not necessarily the biggest site on the web) over to joomla and key usergroups in joomla off usergroups in vbulletin. Then I can, using vbulletin's hook system, issue queries on the joomla user databases whenever necessary to make sure the mirroring is complete.

Sessions present a bit of a challenge though. Again I only want the front-end login process to occur once per session but that will require either having joomla read the vbulletin cookie OR maintain it's own cookie.

Another plan would be to just have joomla 1.5 use the vbulletin session and user tables instead of its own - but I don't think this is possible without hacking the code which I don't want to do.

EDIT: Another thing - the old portal system has about 150 pages of content I'd like to get moved into jos_content where it belongs.  I could write a script to do this but it would be easier if I could somehow call up the document managing objects and pass the data through them to make sure everything is set up correctly.

1.5 has a very powerfull Auth API system - which is to be made even better. I'd start looking at writing an auth plugin that pulls data from your vBuilitain database data. You can let the sessions be as they may.

For the time being, the sessions are not back and forth compatable so users would have to login to Joomla and your forums seperately. Altho, you can add to the Joomla Session system via the current API the Forum session data. Heck, have your forum redirect to joomla login system and you're all set...

So:
1. Create Joomla Auth Plugin to use VB's User Database
2. In the Auth Plugin add to the Joomla Session the VB's Session data
3. Redirect VB's login system to Joomla, and set the redirect to the correct location back for the user.

Should be simple enough.

I've written modules and components but not plugins as of yet so I'm not familiar with the process. Anywhere I could get some documentation or discussion on this process?  Failing that, are there any components or projects out there that do something similar I can pull apart and analyze at a source code level?

I would recomend looking at the current Auth Plugins that are available. Jinx and I are working on a more sophisticated plugin for OpenID that will probably hit SVN sooner or later.

As for discussions - You can do it here on this post (Keeps the forum clean).

I'd recommend you start with just getting Joomla to Auth against the other DB. Once you have that, then move on to adding sessions.

I don't have a vBuilitain DB - but if you ZIP up any code and make a fake UserDB I'll be happy to dump it into my DEV system for you.

Unforutnately vbulletin isn't GPL so sharing the code is a violation of the EULA. I guess I could get a copy of the database structure and the auth libraries of vbulletin for study purposes though - since the object isn't to copy their code but create interoperability between it and joomla I believe that would fall under fair use. I also don't think Jelsoft would object - they are very open with third parties extending their supporting their code.

Don't need code - write a quick php file that dumps the $_SESSION variable. (print_r($_SESSION)) run it before and after you login. Now you know how it gets/sets sessions.

As for the database, use phpMySQL or a simple program like that to dump the schema.

You now have everything you need to build your new Joomla Auth Plugin

Sounds simple enough - I can get vbulletin to dump it's session data easily enough -- but how do you write auth plugins, or for that matter plugins in general.  I presume they need an install xml file like the components and modules do -- and I also presume I need to know which event(s) the plugin will need to trigger off of and enter them in the xml file.  Where do I find this sort of literature on the site - I've been trying google and search and turning up empty handed.

Tell you what - You send me the dumps - I'll build a plugin and post the code for you.

I'll need a user table from SQL and session data.

Apparently vbulletin doesn't use $_SESSION when cookies are available. This is the result of a dump



A structure dump of the DB's in question is at http://www.enworld.org/dumps.zip  Since there are 256 tables in the db I pulled the user related tables out into an sql file by themselves.

Thank you for your time on this.  In the meanwhile I'll move onto skinning joomla for this site and working on a custom frontpage component for the site.

Hi mlmorr0 / CoolAcid ,

I am excited to hear you try to bridge vBulletin and Joomla! 1.5.  Bridging Joomla 1.0x and vB was a challenge.  Many attempts and the only one that was any good was bbpixel's version and it required a fair number of vB code hacks.

It seems that the AUTH upgrades in 1.5 will finally allow a meaningful bridge.

That is not to trivialize the attempts that have been made. 

Please visit the vBridge/com_connector forums here ---> http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/board,174.0.html

The people to talk to are Predator and Leonsio.  I am sure they have some code/suggestions that would help your plans.

Many many people are hoping for a working solution.  And I feel, that once a good solution is established, even more people would be
interested in a vB/J! site. 

Hope to see you both in the forums.

Interesting links. Looking at them. However, I've ran into my first real hurdle - and it wasn't where I expected it.  I can't get my test plugins to install - Hell, I can't get ANYTHING to install.

Keep running into this error...

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /www/enworld.org/dev/htdocs/libraries/joomla/filesystem/archive.php on line 53

PHP 5.0.5

I really don't want to recompile PHP on the server for this to work

OK - so I've played with it a bit.

I was able to get a hold of a Q&A VB site to auth against. It's more then just check password and create session cookies.

VB does some weird stuff with the password - ie:



With my code, I was able to auth against the VB, but not create the VB sessions. I may look more at it later. Since there is a plugin already for 1.0.x I would see about talking to them for session creations.

Find me start off point here: http://jakendall.coolacid.net/joomla

BTW: there is no extra funky stuff in here like checking for multiple logins etc. Just bash against VB's DB. Also, the DB has to be the same as Joomla - table prefix can be different (and should be). Shouldn't be to trivial to add support for other DBs.

Mod note : moved post to 1.5 development forum for easy followup by the development working group.

Due to the error noted above I will be shifting my focus on Joomla 1.0 for now.

any updates here ?