Quick and dirty integration with Vanilla?

Vanilla’s intrepid creator has just integrated it with Wordpress:

http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/3441/vanilla-wordpress-integration/#Comment_41273

He says it took three hours. I could attempt it in MODx but it would take me three weeks and probably be very scary. I haven’t even begun to think about the way MODx handles users and authentication.

I cannot afford to pay anyone to do this, being a blessed but modest minister of good news, but it would be beyond cool if this could be done soon for MODx. I continue to feel that Vanilla would be an ideal lightweight forum for nearly any MODx application. Vanilla is the just-right conversation tool for almost all the big-or-little ministries I help in my ’spare’ time in my tech semi-retirement.

I know the Core Team doesn’t have the time but maybe some passionate hacker will jump in. Hey, don’t make me turn to Wordpress ... oh, the pain.

I have been a fan of vanilla for a long time too.
MODx’s SMF module is simply amazing, but it is nice to have as many options as possible.
I think a vanilla bridge would be right in line with the MODx style.
thanks for that link.

-sD-

For most sites indeed, Vanilla is a great solution. I love how "light" it is. It doesn’t have powermoderator tools to deal with the frequent comment spammers and so forth, which we need to support a structure like MODx, but I personally plan on using it for my father’s business in the relatively near future. So to say I’d love to see an integration as well would be simply stating the obvious.

Unclassified is another on to watch: http://newsboard.unclassified.de/

Interesting. Forums are definitely something I need on my sites; I am not a Vanilla fan, but choice is always good.

Mr Lussumo has documented exactly what he did:
http://lussumo.com/docs/doku.php?id=vanilla:integration:wordpress

In summary, he:
1) Alters Wordpress’s user table - he adds all the Vanilla user fields that aren’t represented.
2) Alters Vanilla’s field-mapping to use equivalent Wordpress fields.
3) Bungs in Vanilla authentication based on cookies (because Wordpress doesn’t use sessions).
4) Tweaks his user details to have the Vanilla admin RoleID
5) Alters Vanilla’s create-user functions to add in the Wordpress fields.

So in short this is a bridge that lets you use the Wordpress user table for both sites, and if you’re logged into one site you’re logged into the other. That’s all good stuff, but is only really the start for full integration.

Now, the documentation is particularly useful as it gives valuable pointers to how to integrate with MODx - although of course the whole "cookie-based authentication" section.

Notably there’s no routine included for converting any existing Vanilla users to the combined setup - although there are now enough clues for how it would be done. I expect a flood of "but I already have Wordpress + Vanilla, how do I merge them??" posts, and that Lussumo guy will probably write up another guide soon.

Personally I’d wait a week and see how real people get on integrating Vanilla with Wordpress on real websites, but there’s enough information in that document for anyone familiar with MODx to do this basic user-table integration with Vanilla with MODx in about an hour. Some of it is really useful - like the fact that you’re supposed to over-ride table mappings by adding lines to Vanilla.1.0.1/conf/database.php rather than just hacking Vanilla.1.0.1/appg/database.php.

Such a shame many of us have 0.9.5 matters and other things to do first! Anyone got a spare hour?

Obviously MODx has the whole "web user currently different from manager user" obstacle, which would probably mean that it would be best for the Vanilla admin to be a MODx webuser. And obviously long term it would be best if the templating of MODx could be applied to Vanilla.

I’m very encouraged by your kind replies based, I know, on your own hardheaded evaluation of Vanilla. I truly wish I could do even an ’alpha’ integration given how pressed all of you are with more vital stuff.

While I am considering Wordpress and Textpattern (an integration project is underway) on their merits for a couple of these Vanilla-ish projects, I think I could wait a while on a MODx solution.

I realize I could also tweak Vanilla itself to ’look’ both bloggish as well as forum-ish until a MODx integration appears. That was done in this simple, clever hack:

http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/658/site-list-of-vanilla-users/#Item_24

that modifies this unusual site:

http://www.thebeautifullie.com/

Anyhow, I won’t be making final decisions on how I will use Vanilla for a couple of weeks. If someone with skillz could do an alpha MODx integration in an ’hour’ - I put quotes around that because it might, after all, be one of those ’programmer hours’ which stretch a bit - then I could really begin ... praying.

You see, that’s my hidden skill which get things going. Hey, I was only kidding (ducking the lightning bolts that have just appeared above my house after writing that sentence ...)!

Seriously, thanks, whether or not someone pushes this through in the near-term.

Interesting lesson on integration, indeed! And as I see, Vanilla does the bigger part of the job by providing a "field-mapping-layer" - way cool!
I do not promise anything, but I’ll have a closer look on this. I would prefer to add a "mapping-table" instead of extending the existing MODx-table though, just for compat-issues...

Unfortunately, although Vanilla has field mapping, it doesn’t actually allow you to use a different table:

so short of some fairly major hacking of Vanilla, I think you’re stuck with extending the existing table. Which I don’t think is a bad thing.

If you are concerned about compatability with similar fields in the future, it may make sense to add each new field with the prefix "Vanilla_" - which would mean remapping *every* field in Vanilla, eg:

Quote from: PaulGregory at Aug 24, 2006, 12:24 PM

Unfortunately, although Vanilla has field mapping, it doesn’t actually allow you to use a different table:

Thanks for this hint Paul. In fact I did think more of teaching a MODx-snippet or plugin to map than to hack Vanilla which already made half of the way. An "intermediate" table (EDIT: related to MODx user-tables) so to say, which is used by all functions (in a snippet or whatever) which provide the actual "integration".
Reconsidering it, it would be not "integrating" but "interfacing".
(I would say the SMF-bridge uses a similar approach, but I never looked at the details so far.)

Quote from: rthrash at Aug 24, 2006, 08:11 AM

Unclassified is another on to watch: http://newsboard.unclassified.de/

+1 on this one, I have been in touch with Yves (the dev) and worked on the french translation but dropped the effort ever since I got involved here. But I just love UNB. It’s a good balance between simplicity and features IMHO, like PunBB.

This been said, I’d love to see a Vanilla integration, especially since it’s a great lightweight app and also it wouldn’t hurt marketing

The benefit of Vanilla is that there is a tutorial on integration
Maybe Yves provides something similar? Will you ask him, David? (could also be in french - I wouldn’t mind)