Intro and CodeIgniter 3x - jsConnect (SSO) - Responsive Design
donovanb
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Hello,
Intro and first question here on Vanilla (which I've been wanting to take for a spin for a while)!!...
I am a web worker monkey of about 20 years now. Over the years, I've used / managed a handful of forums, and have even built a couple of them from scratch (That's what we did in the old days :-) ). At my current day job we are currently reviewing forums with the idea of switching many of them to the same platform. My gaze is set upon Vanilla.
I've all but decided to start with trying out Vanilla on our latest site rebuild, but I wanted to get some comments from the "people in the know" first.
As mentioned, this immediate project uses:
- Codeigniter 3x, employing a custom and basic users-groups database.
- The site is responsive.
- We also have many wordpress based sites.
My questions to you all..
1.) Has anyone any experience integrating Codeigniter and Vanilla? What are the things to look out for there?.. Best practices?... gotchyas?.. Any comments appreciated.
2.) My plan is to use jsConnect with this first project. It looks fairly straight forward... but same question.. is there any "gotchya's" to look out for there?
http://docs.vanillaforums.com/help/sso/jsconnect/overview/
3.) One of the reasons I am interested in Vanilla is for embeding in our wordpress sites, down the road. I've noticed though that the plug-in does not appear to work with the latest version of wordpress. How stable / up-to-date is that plug-in? Is it maintained? Does it work with the latest wordpress?
https://wordpress.org/plugins/vanilla-forums/
TIA... just basically looking for any success/fail stories in any of these areas.
Cheers,
Donovan
Comments
I've done a lot of work with Codeigniter and know it inside out. Embedding Vanilla forums in a CI based website is trivial and works very well. But I had little success with integrating the authentication/permission system of Vanilla with a CI based site. Messed with it far too long without success.
Had to set Vanilla aside for a couple years and have recently started investigating it again. This time I'm trying to build the website as a Vanilla Application. This is showing promise. I think a very useable site with good front and backends can be put together in a reasonable time once the system is understood. Seems to me that Vanilla takes many CI concepts to the next level and are easy to use as a result. But I've had to step through a lot of code with xdebug to really understand how the pieces flow together because the documentation barely explains it.
And that, IMO, is the biggest problem with Vanilla - the documentation is not good. What there is of it appears be out of date and, as such, is often wrong. This community has provided much more insight than the documentation. There are many here who know the codebase well and are willing to share their knowledge. The source code is often well commented and usually very readable. But having to decipher plugins and other source code means the learning curve is a lot - a whole lot - slower than could/should be.
Thanks for the comments. Single Sign On (SSO) is very important in my choice for a forum. There are some other forums that tout this ability, but they seem to lack in other (one ore more) characteristics... such as porting utilities, cost, wordpress integration, pedigree, etc... so understanding that Vanilla has, at the least, some forward movement in all these directions.. I'm hoping it'll be the solution.
Great that there is someone here that knows CI!.. I just completed my first site in that framework, so I know enough to be dangerous :-)
For embedding into CI, how did you address the fact that CI uses an SEO friendly URL structure? Is it as simple as changing:
$config['enable_query_strings'] = FALSE; in config.php to TRUE?
Donovan
Well, nevermind on the SEO friendly URL question.. it looks like Vanilla uses that URL structure as well.. so guess it's just a matter of setting something in routes.php.
Not sure if that was purely CI related, but if not: you enable SEO friendly urls in Vanilla by adding
$Configuration['Garden']['RewriteUrls'] = true;to your /conf/config.phpYou don't want to $config['enable_query_strings'] = FALSE because you're then stuck using that instead of the SEO friendly controller/method/args pattern. You can still access query strings though. You just have to structure your controllers appropriately.
There are some CI libs that wrap oauth2 reasonably well. Been too long since I worked with any to make meaningful comments though. The one I dd work with is actively maintained and is here.
Thx R_J.
@dafriend, thx for the Oauth2 comment... will look into that. FYI, $config['enable_query_strings'] = FALSE is the default CI setting.. TRUE only enables the use of ?=... but it's a moot point since I won't need to do that. cheers.
@donovanb, Oops... Yes, I did mean to type, $config['enable_query_strings'] = TRUE. Such are the dangers of cut/paste.