A chain of integrated forums which are independent seperately?!

Roben

First, please see the link below:
http://stackexchange.com/feeds/sites

In the above link, you find subFORUMS of Stackexchange. Each of these forums are independent in nature. They will be known separately by the users of the service, all come together in a community in the name of the STACKEXCHAGE. You can access to the all separeted forums with just one account and your activation details will be calculated separately.

Is it possible to achieve this capability through the Vanilla?

x00

just think forum=category

If you don't want the All Discussions you can simply block access, choose a different default controller such as categories/all.

There are ways of routing sub domain an setting up wild card sub-domain. This is really server rules.

hgtonight

@Roben You want separate Vanilla forums with a single registration system? You register on one site and it 'saves' your spot on the rest?

This can be done. I would look into using jsConnect on all your "sub forums". Then you would have to create a vanilla plugin to act as your jsonp provider.

@x00, I assumed he wanted a more "independent" forum. Something like different themes and plugins.

Roben

@x00 said:
just think forum=category

If you don't want the All Discussions you can simply block access, choose a different default controller such as categories/all.

I was thinking something more specific. I want it to be something more professional.
Please pay attention to the unique appearance of following forums:
http://stackoverflow.com/ + http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/ + http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/ + http://movies.stackexchange.com/ + http://drupal.stackexchange.com/ + http://tex.stackexchange.com/ This are integrated!

Also, glance at this user account: http://security.stackexchange.com/users/5400/polynomial, Notice the bottom of the page, where you can see user "Accounts" and "Badges". This uesr has acted in five services and his/her activations are collected seperately!

In summary, the user must feel in different environments;

@hgtonight said:
Roben You want separate Vanilla forums with a single registration system? You register on one site and it 'saves' your spot on the rest?

Almost YES!

This can be done. I would look into using jsConnect on all your "sub forums". Then you would have to create a vanilla plugin to act as your jsonp provider.

Did you mean I should install some separate Vanilla and then connecting them with jsConnect? Now, I'm reading docs about jsConnet and It looks great. This is your final offer, or may know something better?

Before thinking to Vanilla, I tried to find StackOverFlow software. But eventually I came to the following link:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/
However it is not a public project.

hgtonight

@Roben This should be very possible. As far as the profile integration, that would have to be a plugin as well.

Since this is a large project, I would suggest starting by installing vanilla in two separate folders. Name one master and the other slave. Once you have them both working as standalone forums, install jsConnect in the slave. Then write your custom plugin for the master install. Once that works, you should be able to install as many vanilla forums into separate folders as you want and just enable jsConnect in each slave forum.

Does anyone here have experience using Vanilla as a JSONP provider for jsConnect?

Roben

@hgtonight said:
Since this is a large project, I would suggest starting by installing vanilla in two separate folders. Name one master and the other slave.

Hmmm, a few moments ago, I found this link: "You'll need 3 config files and 3 databases. You could use server config or symlinks to make 3 sites run off the same physical files, they'd just need to each access a different config file".

In general, whether Vanilla is a good choice for my goal?

x00

Yes it can be done. You need to specify the cookie location carefully, is it is not specifically built as a multitsite but you could use symlinked core, which would allow you to have custom themes, plugins, etc. It is best if your create you own script to deploy new forums.

You could have the same cookie salt for each of them as set the cookie domain to cover the whole domain an subdomian, that way you wouldn't need to make use of jsConnect. Any of the forum sign ins would work, but you could direct to a single one.

This is your final offer, or may know something better?

There are no offers, you are going to have to do it, if you want this to get off the ground.

If you look at vanillaforums.com it offers a similar "hosted" solution, it just leaves out the public directory.

Getting something to work is one thing, setting up scalable architecture to go with it, is another thing entirely.

x00

You'd have symlink the user table to all the forums though, as otherwise the users won't match up.

But this won't really work for InnoDB, but somethign else like MyIsam would work.

What you could do is have one sign up on the 'base' forum. Block /entry on all the other forums, so they can't add users etc. You might block everything but /entry on the base, just use it for logging on and off.

Then create a mysql after insert trigger event for the GDN_User table on the 'base' forum, and use that to populate the other tables. Or perhaps easier would be to hook the AfterInsertUser and then detect the other database forums (perhaps they could be prefixed), and insert the user in each of them.

Such a system would allow you to have separate profiles, even different nicks. But they will have to use the the one username or email to log on.

Roben

@x00 said:
just think forum=category

In this case If I rewrite categories URLs by htaccess, then what about topic URLs?

For example:

vanillaforums.org/categories/developers => developers.vanillaforums.org

vanillaforums.org/categories/feedback => feedback.vanillaforums.org

http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/24670/feedback-for-discussion-polls is for Feedback category

http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/25089/opening-popup-programatically is for Developers category

How to rewrite topic URLs to assign them to developers.vanillaforums.org or feedback.vanillaforums.org?