Integration of Phorum and Drupal

Thanks to Maurice's very helpful embed_phorum mod I've been able to successfully integrate Phorum with Drupal. My code is available as a Drupal module called phorum_integrate.

The approach I'm using is for Drupal to do the user authentication and Phorum to act as a slave. User IDs are shared between Drupal and Phorum. This means it's not suitable for integrating an already in use Phorum database, only a fresh install, because otherwise the user IDs might not match. For that case you'd need a new table to map between user IDs: I guess you could use email addresses to create the initial mapping.

The Drupal core forum is not the best, so being able to integrate Phorum is a positive step, I think. It would be good to have them integrated more closely, so for instance they could use the same BBcode plugin and other content creation tools. A Phorum module which delegated to Drupal's input filtering would be one way to get there.

Also it would be nice to be able to present content from the forum on other pages (a 'latest posts' block or the like). All other suggestions welcome.

Also it would be nice to be able to present content from the forum on other pages (a 'latest posts' block or the like).

Okay, as a teaser, I present you the Ajax based last threads, last postings and hot topics interface that I'm currently running on my website. The only drawback is that this is based on Phorum 5.2 code, so it's not available for Phorum 5.1. So all who like this, will have to wait till 5.2 goes stable :-) One of the nice things in this approach, is that I am able to include newflags in the lists. I will also write code for integrating the followed threads in this interface.

The Phorum side of it all is an Ajax phorum mod, which adds all kinds of Ajax functionality to Phorum. The front end is developed separately and makes use of the Ajax mod for doing calls. It uses a client javascript library which is provided by the Ajax mod, for easy intercommunication.

Curious by now?
See the tab interface at [www.gitaar.net]

---

Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce