Rails and bb forum integration

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I'm new to Rails. Have read the Agile book. Working on new app, its going well.

Now, I am at a crossroads. I need to choose a bbs for my site

The significance for rails development is that I want to have single sign on between both my Rails app and my forum.

I was just about to work on integrating the Rails SaltedLoginGenerator into my rails app when I read this post http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/PhpBB+Integration which basically suggested that the Rails app should delegate the user managment to the forum. I have no argument against this. The only "feature" of the SaltedLoginGenerator which I will miss is the "user stamping" feature. I've already added the "created_by" and "updated_by" columns to my tables and was looking forward to the login generator management of those. I suppose, I can extract that code from the SLG and use it independently.

Is the concensus that delegating user management to bbs is the way to go, or are others of the opinion that the relationship should be inverted and the Rails app should be the central point of user managment control?

As for BBS choice. Does anyone have experience with integrating these packages and have any recommendations, advice?

I've been reading up on phpbb, punbb and vanilla.

Vanilla seems interesting as it seems like a second generation effort and has an extensibility story.

phpbb is the old standard. Have read mixed reviews, some love it, some hate it.

punbb seems like a stream lined version of punbb.

Any opinion on those options is welcome.

2

I use SMF and did exactly that, delegated the login to the PHP forum and then hijack the PHP session in Rails. I'm not happy with it, it feels "dirty", but it works.

If you're at the point where you've not even chosen a forum yet, why not take a look at the Rails forums that are available. There's Beast, Opinion and RForum just to name a few. They won't integrate with what you're doing out-of-the-box, but it'll be a lot easier to make that work and much cleaner than going the php route.

Cheers, John