in my never ending quest to try to build up the "rest of my site" i have installed yet another CMS to try to bring some more valuable content to the site besides the message board.
my board is very active, and is related to climbing/outdoor pursuits in the Pacific NW region of the US. the main problem i have encountered is that the non-ubb pages just don't get used as much, and great content that has been added to the message board often gets buried under new posts, so my goal is to have a system that can pull/mirror great posts from threads, into the "front-end" part of the site... sound confusing, well it is.
in the past, my problem has been of course, lack of integration between CMS and my message board software, so i've searched around for a CMS that isn't very robust, is easily modifiable (is that a word?) and *does not* have an integrated forum package (many CMS systems already come either bundled with one or integrate with phpBB), after trying about a dozen i found Mambo (
www.mamboserver.com). It's GNU, its lightweight, and ready to be hacked away at.
what i've done.... so far i've got it to the point where all user privledges are pulled from w3t_Users, so there is one centralized point of account administration. unfortunatley i don't have the sessions integrated yet, so one has to log in to the main poriton to post there as well as the bbs, but nevertheless, its one registration, one user name.
i've made some modules to pull latest posts from threads, used the great photopost pal (with some tweaks) to grab some images as well, and am working on a who's online script as well.
I also have added in a very basic events calendar into the mambo server which i can pull events into a sidebar pal, so things are coming together very nicely.
eventually, i'll have it so admins/mods can mirror a great post by one click into the CMS site, as well as users being able to post to the CMS and have the content in a thread as well, but that is a ways off.
nevertheless, its starting to look pretty cool, and just thought i'd share my adventure into threads integration with y'all.
www.cascadeclimbers.comif you have any questions, critiques or suggestions send me a pm!
chillin
