Phorum and CakePHP ?

I've been considering porting my custom CMS to CakePHP framework for awhile now.

I haven't got as far as figuring out how I would get Phorum to work with the it.. Currently I am using the Embed Phorum module with 5.1.

Does anyone have some theoretical insight on how one would get CakePHP working with a non-cake app like Phorum?

IMO the question would be, what features exactly you want to "integrate" with CakePHP.

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Thomas Seifert

what features?

Everything, but strip off DOCTYPE html and body tags. I tried fiddling with the phorum tpl files once, in order to do just that. But couldn't get phorum to work reliably as a widget.

I've been looking at the Vanilla forum which has a convenient widget mode....where that forum can become the contents of a DIV. Unfortunately Vanilla does not support threading. I tried the SMF forum a while back, because they claim an "import from phorum" module plus threading plus a widget mode. But the SMF forum turns out to be a security disaster. Phorum is the best forum in all respects except one: ...no embeddable widget mode.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2011 03:59PM by salmobytes.

How does that "Widget Mode" work in other forums?

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Thomas Seifert

Well it's mostly the enclosing CMS, no?

If the CMS supports a plugin API you put phorum-as-a-widget in the CMS's plugins directory.
Phorum does what it always does, sans DOCTYPE head and body. And what does spit out
of phorum becomes a DIV contents, as handled by the CMS.

"Widgets" can be everything.
From a javascript widget which is loaded directly into the page or any other integration way.
You can't do redirection or any header stuff when loaded "into a div" aka when you just include it. Thats why the portable code needs you to use output buffering so that header redirections are sent before any output.

Thats why I was asking what the "convenient widget mode" is like. How thats implemented, how it works.

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Thomas Seifert

wouldn't the widget mode just be alot like the embed phorum module?

any feelings on if that will be updated to work with the current version of phorum anytime soon?

thanks for the responses.

having the ability to embed phorum easily really is an a huge asset as a developer.

i think the widgetized version would allow you to pass phorum parameters in the code of the master program.

We have no current plans to write the embed_phorum module again.

It takes a lot of time as its not a question of just "updating" but needing a full rewrite from scratch and there is no current need for any of the developers for such a module.
Maurice said he might do it anyway if he got time to do it but he's quite busy for the time being so I wouldn't bet on it.

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Thomas Seifert

Quote
Thomas Seifert
We have no current plans to write the embed_phorum module again.

It takes a lot of time as its not a question of just "updating" but needing a full rewrite from scratch and there is no current need for any of the developers for such a module.
Maurice said he might do it anyway if he got time to do it but he's quite busy for the time being so I wouldn't bet on it.

This is a shame from my perspective (and others too it seems) because in all other respects I do prefer Phorum to all others I've tried. But this does mean I'll be experimenting with other forums now. I've done the message migration stuff several times now, to and from phorum. That's not the hard part. I'm not personally interested in Cake. What would really be useful is a phorum that could be plugged into any arbitrary CMS. That's the system that will ultimately win the popularity contest. Forums as a separate page are functionally obsolete in the current context.

Bear with me if I'm being ignorant or stupid here (I'm sure I am). I don't fully understand the aforementioned You can't do redirection or any header stuff when loaded "into a div" aka when you just include it issue. How many of these header redirections does Phorum do? Couldn't this be done by stripping out the head and body *.tpl stuff from the template, and then leave it up to the local CMS programmer to rewrite header redirection handling?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/13/2011 10:55AM by salmobytes.