Jason Barnabe

I’ve set up a forum for userstyles.org so my users can discuss Stylish and the site and styles without being to confined to a single thread on mozillaZine. When deciding on a forum, the main thing I was looking for was the ability to integrate it with  the current site - a forum account and a main site account would be the same thing, the ability to automatically generate topics, etc. I initially tried looking for a Rails forum to go with my Rails site, thinking this would offer the greatest possibility for integration. I looked at Beast, the 500-line of code forum. I soon discovered the problem of my Rails approach - Beast expected to be its own app rather than part of the existing app. So much for that level of integration.

I eventually stumbled on this post by Jesse Skinner. He described a very easy way of integrating Vanilla (a PHP forum) with a Rails app (or any type of app, for that matter). Since Dreamhost supports PHP and I couldn’t include a Rails forum in my app, I gave it a try, and everything worked great.

Some extra tweaks/info above what Jesse suggested:

• When programmatically creating a user, you need to at least specify name, password, role ID, and the first visit date.
• I wanted a user’s name to be the same on the main site and in the forum. To accomplish this, I had my Rails code update the forum user’s name on update. I also disallowed people from directly changing their name in Vanilla with this setting: $Configuration['ALLOW_NAME_CHANGE'] = ‘0′;
• I wanted a sign in on the forum to mean the same as a sign in on the main site. Same for sign out. I updated the following Vanilla settings to point to my Rails’s login and logout logic: SIGNIN_URL, SIGNOUT_URL, SAFE_REDIRECT
• Since the forum sign in is handled by the Rails app, $Configuration['ALLOW_PASSWORD_CHANGE'] = ‘0′;
• The forum install process requires a database user with the rights to create the tables. Once this was done, I created a new user with CRUD on the forum tables and nothing else.

This entry was posted Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Blogroll, rails, vanilla. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.