Rails and bb forum integration

Rails
1

Hi,

I’m new to Rails. Have read the Agile book. Working on new app, its
going well.

Now, I am at a crossroads. I need to choose a bbs for my site

The significance for rails development is that I want to have single
sign on between both my Rails app and my forum.

I was just about to work on integrating the Rails SaltedLoginGenerator
into my rails app when I read this post
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/PhpBB+Integration which
basically suggested that the Rails app should delegate the user
managment to the forum. I have no argument against this. The only
“feature” of the SaltedLoginGenerator which I will miss is the “user
stamping” feature. I’ve already added the “created_by” and “updated_by”
columns to my tables and was looking forward to the login generator
management of those. I suppose, I can extract that code from the SLG
and use it independently.

Is the concensus that delegating user management to bbs is the way to
go, or are others of the opinion that the relationship should be
inverted and the Rails app should be the central point of user
managment control?

As for BBS choice. Does anyone have experience with integrating these
packages and have any recommendations, advice?

I’ve been reading up on phpbb, punbb and vanilla.

Vanilla seems interesting as it seems like a second generation effort
and has an extensibility story.

phpbb is the old standard. Have read mixed reviews, some love it, some
hate it.

punbb seems like a stream lined version of punbb.

Any opinion on those options is welcome.

2

I use SMF and did exactly that, delegated the login to the PHP forum
and then hijack the PHP session in Rails. I’m not happy with it, it
feels “dirty”, but it works.

If you’re at the point where you’ve not even chosen a forum yet, why
not take a look at the Rails forums that are available. There’s Beast,
Opinion and RForum just to name a few. They won’t integrate with what
you’re doing out-of-the-box, but it’ll be a lot easier to make that
work and much cleaner than going the php route.

Cheers,
John

3

Johnpg wrote:

I use SMF and did exactly that,

Hi John,

Thanks for reply. I still haven’t chosen my BB software yet. I don’t
think the RForum is mature enough for my needs. Why did you choose SMF
btw? My biggest requirement in forum are
being able to establish hierarchical forums,
being able to programatically (from Rails app) provision new topics in
the forum
being able to customize the New Post form (to add some custom input
fields)