Easiest forum to add to Evo site quickly

Hi,

I've got a site running on MODx Evo 1.0.3 and I need to add a forum to it WITHIN A WEEK.

I plan to upgrade to Revo in the future but, for now, I just need the easiest solution to quickly add a forum to my Evo site.

Key requirement is integration:
+ MODx Web User login also logs into the forums
+ MODx Web User Groups controls which forums users can access

A bit of googling suggests two forums that can be integrated into MODx Evo site are phpBB and SMF.

What I would like to know from the community is what is the best option (phpBB, SMF or something else) given the short timescale and requirements above.

Thanks in advance,

Colin

Check Vanilla. It has a nice Javascript-based login integration feature that's easy to use with MODX users. All you need to do is create a snippet that returns the user's ID, username and email. The Vanilla SSO system will do the rest.
http://blog.vanillaforums.com/help/implementing-jsconnect-single-signon-on/
http://blog.vanillaforums.com/jsconnect-technical-documentation/
http://www.vanillaforums.org/addon/jsconnect-plugin

The Vanilla site seems to be having problems. Try here http://www.thecodinggeek.com/vanilla-forums-2-1-beta-1-released/ and here http://www.thecodinggeek.com/how-to-install-vanilla-forums-2-1-beta-1/

You can also download it from GitHub. https://github.com/vanillaforums/Garden

Installation is pretty easy; create a database and database user for it, then just go to wherever you put the files and run the index.php file.

[ed. note: sottwell last edited this post 12 years, 7 months ago.]

Checking out the latest version from github - it comes with all the plugins necessary to use a Google account as a login. Pretty nice.

Great, thanks for the reply.

Hi,

Installing Vanilla alongside MODx was trouble free.

I first tried the jsConnect 1.4.1 plugin but that gave regex error. So, I then switched, as recommended on forums elsewhere, to older 1.0.3 version. With a bit of fiddling around I was able to get MODx site to talk to Vanilla and provide user details (jsonp page) so that Vanilla knew which user was logged in. It also successfully created a user account in Vanilla on first login. The plugin for automatic sign in was not approved by Vanilla so I didn't try that (yet).

However, I've had problems with sign out. I want to sign out of Vanilla when signing out of MODx. The OnWebLogout plugin removes the Vanilla cookie but that doesn't sign user out. I then discovered that in the settings of the jsConnect connection it will not remember the signout URL. I wonder if that's the problem.

If anyone has this working I'd appreciate tips / walkthrough for:
+ automatic signin to Vanilla when signin to MODx
+ automatic signout from Vanilla when signout of MODx (and hide Sign Out in Vanilla)

Thanks,


My dev environment is:

Vanilla 2.0.18.10
MODx Evo 1.0.3
WAMP 2.0i
- Apache 2.2.11
- PHP 5.3.0
- MySQL 5.1.36

Progress update:

Thought I was running jsConnect plugin 1.0.3 but realised I had a messed up mixture of 1.0.3 and 1.4.1. I cleaned it out and reinstalled 1.0.3 but that doesn't have signout URL in settings.

So, I installed 1.4.1 plugin and started debugging. The regex error that is reported on the vanilla forums is easy to 'ignore' by commenting out a line of code (can't remember where at this point) but then the plugin falls over when saving settings. Tracked it down to when it's trying to add some data for a new connection. As far as I could tell it was trying to use the SQL driver to add data to my MySQL database! That's probably a bad idea.

A possible cause of this: When I installed vanilla I set it to use existing MODx db. It's added tables in there and the system works fine. So, not really sure why that plugin is apparently trying to use SQL.

Anyone else ever seen this?
Is there any config options I might be missing to choose MySQL driver for plugins to use?

Cheers,