Thread: Best of Three Worlds - Integrating Dolphin 7 with Wordpress, Phpbb3 (or other forum)

So let the saga begin.

Over the past few years - I have led a small but loyal online community of investors. We've bounced around the internet from site to site and hosting service to hosting service. After a time - I took a step forward and built our first site to meet our needs. Now we've skipped forward through a few more sites - I'm the owner - and we have a single website - kingofalltrades.com - that has Wordpress - phpBB3 - and prochatrooms.

This leads to our latest step - migrating to Dolphin 7. Now that we have decided to attempt to integrate EVERTHING we need into a single fused site - Dolphin seemed to be the natural choice. Couple problems though - one: Orca is not going to cut it. My posters - at a minimum - need to be able to post stock charts during trading hours at the major exchanges. Simple things are huge distractions when my members are focused on watching stock tickers.

The blog portion of Dolphin 7 - doesn't have some of the functionality we'd need to retain from Wordpress. Example would be the need to auto generate a google news sitemap - and send a ping so the bots would index us for google finance and straight google news. We also feed now to other publishing sources. An RSS feed isn't robust enough for that type of publishing. Thus we were at a point considering keeping the Wordpress separate (as it is now) and using Dolphin/Phpbb3 (or a substitue bulletin system) for the community/social networking side.

For anyone that doesn't know already - just integrating phpBB3 with Dolphin is a huge deal. There are several people out there offering a quick integration package to tie phpbb3 and dolphin 7 together. Make sure you read the fine print. Aside from cosmetically placing the forums into a tab in Dolphin - you don't get alot of fusion/integration.

Intent of me starting this thread - is to share our pain/experience with others. I also hope we can get input from any of you experienced site developers out there. I've almost decided to drop integrating phpBB3 - unless Smoge and the others here say there's not a better answer. Wordpress - is my latest question to pose for them. My goal is to have our site completely integrated - by the end of the summer.

On a positive note - we very much like the new chat module in Dolphin 7. My moderators have been testing it out and will likely mutiny if I don't keep it. So we're ditching our prochatrooms or keeping it as a backup to the dolphin chat.

What say you group ? Suggestions? Comments? Humorous jabs?

I'll keep posting here as things progress. I'm hoping ModMySite can help get us straightened out. We need to get situated for our future growth.

Rick
kingofalltrades.com

As we spoke about...

The major hassle is due to Dolphin 6/7 moving to a MD5 encrypted password.... while this is all great and dandy for improving security - it makes integrating 3rd party scripts more troublesome.

In fact, older versions of Clean used to ask on install, if you wanted to do away with the MD5 encryption....

But short of doing that, another way we use is to store a encrypted, but un-encrypt-able password - using some custom code - based on a "seed value", where the password is still encrypted in the database to protect against SQL injection exploits, but also allowing us to know the "plain text" password (on de-encryption) to send to 3rd party scripts without having to deal with altering their password functions.

Without that - there is little choice but to modify the 3rd party application password functions to allow for login.

And, with each upgrade of your 3rd party application - the modifications would generally need to be re-added.

Smoge

Smoge,

Would it make more sense to build a way to add the functionality I need to Orca instead of going this route with phpbb3? If we moved the previous phpbb3 profiles over to dolphin - found a way to add the things needed to orca - then all I'd need would be to have my users come over to the new installation - "reset" their passwords (since we wouldn't know them) and then be on their merry way posting on the new site?

Just throwing out ideas.

Ultimately - I am firm that Dolphin is our platform of choice. Perhaps the answer to all this is not the integration so much as working toward mods to Dolphin itself. What do you thing about this versus the integration?

This might also apply to our issues with the blog / publication functions within Dolphin. Our biggest issues using solely Dolphin (and thus moving it down to our root domain and making it THE front application to the site) is that we rely heavily on our publication of articles through Google Finance/Google News and our other partnerships. If we could build mods to address these issues - longer term - we would theoretically be able to just upgrade Dolphin normally and maintain the mods.

Thoughts.... anybody.... Bueller......

Originally Posted by Rick_King

Would it make more sense to build a way to add the functionality I need to Orca instead of going this route with phpbb3?

We talked about that - and you said you did not want to use Orca.

You said it was no good and 1/3 of your users would leave if you used it as they were used to phpBB.

Yes - the way Orca stands now - they would leave. That hasn't changed.

My question is: Can we find a way to add the things necessary to make Orca more like what we currently have. In other words - the "things" my members expect - can we instead develop a way to add those back into Orca/Dolphin versus tying phpbb3 into it.

I'm just throwing ideas out. Phpbb3 integration will probably end up the only way to carry over the functions we need. Just sounding out anything I can think of. As I stated before - we want to do this correctly and not rush before determine the best course.

I am sure my members can get by without their private messages from phpbb3 - their phpbb3 profiles - etc.... i don't think they'll have issues with starting over in most cases from scratch. I'd like for us to at least tie their previous posts to their dolphin profiles - so they receive credit for their contributions (the forum "rank" idea used in most phpbb3 setups) - and so they can go back and edit their former posts if needed. I don't think any one of them would complain if they simply had to re-upload their avatars - or had to start over with their PM's in the forums.

Originally Posted by Rick_King

My question is: Can we find a way to add the things necessary to make Orca more like what we currently have. In other words - the "things" my members expect - can we instead develop a way to add those back into Orca/Dolphin versus tying phpbb3 into it.

We don't really want to do Orca modifications... so we (mysitegroup/modmysite) would pass on that.

Normally, what we do to Orca is remove it - for example, in our past "clean" projects.

Smoge

Thanks for the patience - I wish more thought had gone into Orca - Dolphin is a great platform - but for diehard forum users - it is going to be a stretch getting those users to become comfortable with Dolphin until the forum issue is improved. I just replied to you elsewhere again. I think we should proceed along the lines we originally discussed and see where that leads. I'll post our progress here to document our successes for the rest of the readers. Ultimately - I've convinced my team to stand down on our transition until we get the login issues resolved. Considering the complexity of this integration - we are accepting the fact we will need to make some compromises.

Again - for those of you out there considering an integration - think long and hard before you go down this path. Plan carefully and consult with someone like ModMySite's experts first. I'm glad I found these guys before we did anything we would have regretted. At least now we will move forward with a good plan and tackle each issue in order.

Thanks again Smoge

So far - here we are mid-week. Due to concerns we had with the original server we were on - we have decided to work with SoftLayer and invested in a dedicated server for our site.

Smoge and crew will soon hopefully have us up and working on the new server - ETA -Soon - and I'll give everyone an update. The integration hasn't actually taken place yet - won't be until we get onto the new server and everything is set up appropriately.

For reference - SoftLayer has some pretty incredible servers. I was skeptical at first - but so far it appears like a good idea for us going forward.

Does anyone know if / when Boonex is planning on a major upgrade to Orca? or a mod designed to truly integrate 3rd party forum software? What about Wordpress?

Thanks
Rick
kingofalltrades.com