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.
i don't know if i want to release my sloppyness onto the world! if there is interest i'll do it so it will have configurable variables to go along side any threads install.
A friend of mine started using Mambo some time ago and I got interested in it. I've been thinking of changing from my own cms for some time since I never find the time to add the features I need and Mambo seems to have what I need. If you would share your threads integration when it's finished that would be incredible.
great, i'd love to work with someone on getting an integrated login so threads/cookies/sessions would match up with mambo's... but i'm not well versed in threads sessions and such, so any help would be appreciated.
ok, i got the integration working. now if you are logged into threads or mambo, both recognize, well you are really only logged into threads but you know what i mean
i'm still working out some kinks, but should have a zip of the install ready tomorrow.
Perfect. I've installed Mambo and have been playing around with for a while now. The functionality of most of the modules seem to be very basic, to say the least. There aren't any extra information for links in the link directory, not even a visit count... Some other things are really neat though, and having all scripts in one package is really neat.
I'm trying to get it to look the way I want it to now, I'm well on my way, but there are some things I haven't quite worked out yet.
nice, yeah there is quite a bit of stuff i've stripped out: who's online, polls are a few of them.
the main things i've done to get things really tied in is to modify includes/accesscheck.php to use threads session info, but i've done this by including the following in index.php for mambo:
Code
<br />include "{$mosthreadspath}/main.inc.php";<br />// Get the user info<br />$Username = $w3t_myname;<br />$Password = $w3t_mypass;<br />$userob = new user;<br />$usert = $userob -> authenticate("");<br />
where $mosthreadspath= path to ubb install and is a variable i use throughout the scripts for other items
my stuff is *very* sloppy right now, i'm just in the hack away and see if it works mood here goes:
Code
<br />function checkaccess($cook, $db, $dbprefix){<br /> /* Get the visitor's GroupID */<br /> $gidf = 0;<br /> if ($cook<>"" && $usert['U_Number']>'0'){<br /> //pulled this shizzy out to use threads cookie, if U_Number is set, then they are registered ~ chillin<br /> //$cryptSessionID=md5($cook);<br /> //$queryg = "SELECT gid FROM ".$dbprefix."session WHERE session_ID='$cryptSessionID'";<br /> //$resultg = mysql_db_query($db, $queryg) or die("Did not execute query");<br /> //while ($rowg = mysql_fetch_object($resultg)){<br /> $gidf = '1';<br /> } else {<br /> $gidf = '0';<br /> }<br /> <br /> return $gidf;<br />}
as you can see, the access check would just see what group the person is in (0=unregistered 1=registered 3=special) so if the U_Number is set via authenticate() then we know they are registered so i set group id=1 else gid=0
the main other files i've modded to get things all tied in: leftcomponent userpage usermenu
so now users can login via the mambo index.php or via the boards and all is normal
modules i have so far: latest threads a disfunctional pm inbox photopost events
i'm going to tweak the included weather module so folks can set their favorite location and auto change the weather to that location when they login, this is big for outdoor enthusiasts that visit my site. speaking of which, i need to get outside
i'm having some issues making this friendly for others to mod, so many of my ubb.t queries are customized for my site's table prefixes.. i'm afraid to share the mods since this is the case cuz it could really mess some folks up.
next on the docket: adding buttons to editpost.php in threads so admin/mods can publish threads to news/events/articles
i have added in a "mambo it" function to my threads, where admins/mods/and users who originally posted a message can choose to publish said content to the CMS.
it works pretty much like choosing who gets access to the 'edit' button in showflat/threaded.
user's get a new icon in their "post extras" row, the mambo-it icon as i like to call it. they click on that and then choose which portion of the CMS they would like to publish to
cms script grabs post number/unumber and does the rest, grabs the content from _Posts, and notifies the admin that a new submission has been made.
way cool. like i said, my code is very customized at this point to my site (table names, cms field types as well) that i can't really relase it.
That sounds really good, it would make my editors happy, they already know how to use threads.
If you get it cleaned up and release it, I would greatly appreciate it. I would probably use it to publish content on my site which I'm hard at work converting to mambo (which is coming along rather nicely) with the added bonus of being able to discuss all articles and news stories and such. Do you have a link back to the discussion of an article? I will probably add a threads comment box on the article page, and possibly a quick list of the discussion as well, if I get the time.
I've made some modules and a component for mambo as well, but they are probably not interesting to others since they are very specific to my site. I did redo mainbody.php to show the recent articles instead of the news stories published for the front page. And two modules are for listing the latest news instead, in two different ways. Those I could actually modify a bit to make it customizable to list them in different ways (like most viewed and stuff like that) if you're interested.
I will probably also modify my old newsletter script to be a mambo module, but since there already is a module released for that it probably isn't of interest. I also have a small module that lists the info of the latest link added.
The next thing I'm going to do is to add a table for Reviews and corresponding components and modules, because I need extra grade info added.
While waiting for the threads link system add-on I'll probably write a small module to search in Links 2.0 from Gossamer Threads, which is the system I use at the moment, as well as a random link viewer.
sweet! i'll try to clean up the code today at work (its pretty slow) and then we can coloborate on it a bit more, so far here is a run down of what i've got:
- various modules (who's online, login, latest threads, pm inbox) - integrated search: mambo search looks in w3t_posts as well and returns the 5 most recent threads that match - mambo-it: posting threads to CMS - integrated login
with the mambo it, i'm copying over thread info: post # and forum, and plan on adding a link back to the thread, i like the idea of displaying a quick synopsis of the last reply to the thread though, and a quick reply box would be splendid as well.
i'm not very intimate with GNU/open source licensing but is it ok legally for me to modify, and repost their code... as long as I keep their script header tags in place?
Please remember that this is setup is not for the faint hearted. To compound that, i'm not the biggest php/mysql guru out there so the code can be slopy at times!
I've had a bunch of fun hackin this thing out and will continue to add on more features to my setup, but it will be a custom job.
If you use the readme.txt in this .zip file, you will have a mambo site server cms that is integrated with your threads install nicely. Integrated login, one user db (threads), some great modules (just like PALS), and of course a pretty nice CMS system to boot.
As always, backup your stuff, no threads db modifciations are necessary at all so have fun, and PM me or post questions here.
Great. I did a quick link to insert a post using the copyThread function, but it dowsn't allow for choosing type of article and such, so I'll just wait for your scripts.
I've done two threads modules, one that shows online users and one that creates a quick list of all the boards on the forum. If you want them, I'll write get them translated into english and send them over.
OK, here you go, I rewrote them so that they are using the language modules of Mambo 4.0.12 RC2 and included an english translation. If you haven't upgraded yet, you could just copy the lines from the english file into the mod_w3tonline.php script and remove the include() line.
Also, the module that lists forums only lists them if they are logged in, but if you want it to list for everyone you just need to remove this line: if ($usert['U_Number'] != "") {
hey guys been trying to get this running, and run up with an error, which i'm thinking is a path error?
Warning: main(/version.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/fordmond/public_html/mambo/mambo/classes/mambo.php on line 28
Warning: main(): Failed opening '/version.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/fordmond/public_html/mambo/mambo/classes/mambo.php on line 28
Warning: main(/classes/database.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/fordmond/public_html/mambo/mambo/classes/mambo.php on line 30
Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required '/classes/database.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/fordmond/public_html/mambo/mambo/classes/mambo.php on line 30
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