Running multiple Forums from One Database

Boyko

Hi all! **Quick Edit: After starting this I looked around some more and found the basic answer. Isn't that always how it works? Anyway please skim it over, mostly my bottom questions. Thanks again!** I am in charge of running several community websites, all running on wordpress, and I recently decided to throw Vanilla forums on all of them. I made this decision instead of just having one forum with different categories because all of the sites cover fairly different topics. Anyways, when I went to install the second copy of Vanilla on the same database it notified me that Vanilla was already installed! First Wall. Before I go on, I thought that I would put in a note about my programming levels: I have taken a couple of high school and first year intro courses on Visual Basic and Java, and taught myself basic HTML about 9 years ago. (Remember when Geocities and animated GIFs were all the rage? I barely do either.) But I never really thought that I would find myself doing this current job so I didn't really pay too much attention or keep myself informed to the changes going on with web design. What I am getting at is that I am not very familiar with alot of current coding, but I am familiar with how code languages work. That being said I can do some very basics hacks in wordpress, and I think Vanilla. Just don't ask me to come up with anything too original. Back to my problem... As a fix to this I decided to do the following. This was based on my experiences with running multiple instances of wordpress on the same database. What I did was go into /appg/database.php and chaged line 15 from $DatabaseTables['User'] = 'LUM_User'; to $DatabaseTables['User'] = 'xxxx_User'; (Where xxxx is the name of the tables that I want to use) and i went into /appg/settings.php and changed line 38 from $Configuration['DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX'] = 'LUM_'; to $Configuration['DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX'] = 'xxxx_'; After that I went and chaged all the Database tables using myAdminPHP from 'LUM_' to 'xxxx_' It seems to work great, but I was wondering if there are any problems with this. Since I basically told Vanilla to simply read and write it's info to a different database, I can't really forsee any but I thought that it would be worth while asking. Also is there an easier way to do this? It only took me about 5 mins, at least once I figured out how to do it, but it seems like way too much manipulation of the core files that come with Vanilla for just using it as Vanilla was designed. Also, wouldn't those files be overwritten in an upgrade? Finally, will the user get to chose their table prefix during the creation of the Vanilla database tables during installation in the future? Wordpress takes care of that very easily, so unless Vanilla and Wordpress are insanely different I think that it would be a nice feature to have. Thanks! Hoping to hear some comments on this, Boyko

Dinoboff

That's the idea, except that you put the custom $Configuration['xxx'] into conf/settings.php and custom $DatabaseTables['xxxx'] (and $DatabaseColumns['xxxx'] into conf/database.php.

You don't have to overwrite these file after each update.

Also you might want all your forums to share the same user table - each forum might need its own $DatabaseColumns['User']['UserBlocksCategories'] and $DatabaseColumns['User']['RoleID'] (maybe over columns can't be shared).