Will SMF and Joomla live happily ever after, together?

[Murgen]

Many years ago I migrated from EZ-board via Ikonboard to Invision. In those marry days Invision slogan was 'why pay for a forum when php and mysql are for free?'. A year later they changed their course and started asking money. I migrated to SMF and became very fond of this little piece of software. In that time I started developing some community-sites and after Mambo I went with the flow to Joomla!

SMF-community had a very fine software-bridge (Oristo!) integrating SMF-Joomla in a very fine way. But the GNU from Joomla blocked distribution so ... end of life cycle.

I'm getting very worried. I see a lot of development for phpBB 3 with Joomla but SMF-developments are falling behind. Right now the JFusion 1.05e alfa is doing nothing good for my portals, I need dual login and I need it bad for even considering upgrading to Joomla 1.5. From my point of view my personal roadmap is the next:

1. JFusion with a proper dual login and cookie handling for SMF (mind you, right now I can't even login into the JFusion portal ... just the phpBB3 forums) and Joomla!

2. Dump Joomla! and pick up Mambo with SMF.

3. Dump Joomla! and continue with TinyPortal.

4. Migrate to phpBB3 to continue Joomla!

Right now SMF is much more important to my community then the portal is. What is your opinion about my personal roadmap. I'm running out of time since the operational Joomla software is getting too old to keep online.

Regards, Murgen

[babjusi]

Option 2 and 3

[青山 素子]

A lot depends on what you features you consider important.

Migration to Mambo is a possibility as Joomla! 1.0 is a fork of Mambo, so it shouldn't be difficult to complete the migration. If you don't need such a "heavy" solution, then TinyPortal is a nice alternative that is lighter.

You could always choose option 4 if you don't see a future in Mambo or SMF, but considering many plugin developers have moved to Mambo from Joomla! since their license clarification, I do think that there is a good future for Mambo. As for SMF, version 2.0 is a good preview of our future.

[Murgen]

SMF never let me down ... so far. Guess where my loyalty is.

[redone]

Also look at Drupal. I have been using Drupal 6 of late and its pretty impressive so is the 5x series as well and it has plenty of established modifications for it too.

[perplexed]

I started with Tiny Portal, went to mambo, joomla, xooops and back to Tiny Portal.  The forum is still the heart of our communities and what members are most interested in.  Mods to the forum are of more interest than any 'portal' modules to our members so it works out well.

[Orstio]

The forum is still the heart of our communities and what members are most interested in.  Mods to the forum are of more interest than any 'portal' modules to our members so it works out well.

That's why it is most important to determine up front whether you really need a CMS or a portal.  If what you need is a site revolving around your community, chances are you need a portal, and not content management.

[Murgen]

That's why it is most important to determine up front whether you really need a CMS or a portal.  If what you need is a site revolving around your community, chances are you need a portal, and not content management.

I agree. My first portals were built with Kevin's (Yauws.com) blocks around Invision. When Kevin quit developing I looked into Mambo and followed the flow to Joomla! Our historic medieval combat guild requires a content management system to make it more easy for the trainers to add and edit content and I know Bloc is a great guy but with Kevin his Yauws down the drain I put the money for my operational sites on larger initiative's. Unless someone tells me Tiny is just as big as Mambo.

[MarChelo]

option 1 or 4.
I love smf, but I won´t leave joomla nevaaaah!

[redone]

I like Joomla as well I guess I would use a smaller scale forum solution or just not bother bridging the two.

[mclane]

I too am a fan of SMF and Joomla. Man, I wish there were a solution.

[AtlasShrugging]

In a similar sinking boat here. 

We manage 60+/-sites & some of them (law libraries) have thousands of pages of content. Anyone on the outside looking in - or a visitor, would think it was a simple enough decision - that content is king. But they'd be wrong. For us, the whole reason for the content is because the community demands it. And the forum is what builds the community. ie they learn from the content - but they discuss & bond & network  & contract through the forum. So you really really have to know your needs, audience, members etc to make a solid decision. We're still wrestling with what to do.

Rotten to have to choose "content over community" so to speak. But given our particular scenario, we absolutely will not quit SMF unless something better comes along. And if there is something better, we've yet to find it.

And I don't want to run a load different CMS. So that means redoing all of them with a new one. It would be much simpler to drop SMF - but easy isn't always right. I think it would cost us way too much in the long run to take the easy way out. And quite frankly (not that I would admit this), being forced to choose doesn't sit well with me anyway, so I'm digging in my heels.

Don't know much about Tiny, & wondering if it's robust enough to handle what we need. Right now it looks like it'll be Drupal as soon as we can stomache rolling up our sleeves for the transition. Unless of course the developers over yonder get lonely & decide to rethink things. 

If anyone has any Drupal/SMF or large integrated Tiny/SMF sites - I would really appreciate some links. I am so not looking forward to this ..

[nightmarepatrol]

I agree with AtlasShrugging (who is John Galt?), I have become fond of drupal as it provides a tremendous amount of flexibility that Joomla and others do not. It is (to me) is also much easier to administrate. But like most CMS systems the forum software lacks the out-of-the-box sophistication and functionality that SMF (and other forums) have.

Since most forums are tacked on to a CMS, but just as important as the CMS itself in many cases I would love to see a way via API's and stylesheets to combine the two and deliver a uniform looking product without massive fussing. Tinyportal is a great mod, but can't deliver the full spectrum of goodies that a CMS can.  I realize there are license issue incompatibilities with SMF and drupal, but is there a way to find a middle ground?


With the onset of SMF 2.x, and Drupal 6, having the ability to integrate SMF and all of it's capabilities with drupal's taxonomy and organic groups would provide an almost limitless possibilities for those of us that run dual package sites.

This of course would be a major undertaking bot technically, ideologically and legally I suppose.

[Orstio]

The issues I had with bridging Drupal were technical, not legal, just so that is understood.

There was an integration made that uses the smf_api.php script, but having a look at the files, it appears they are distributing SMF code without permission.

[nightmarepatrol]

I realize the technical issues could be immense, starting with the user table (the user 0 and user 1 thing) right down to how content is stored and recalled. I would love to see drupal and SMF gleefully coexisting with one another as they are (IMHO) the two best at what they do.

I'll see if I can find the script, but again I don't want to violate any licensing either.

[Orstio]

Database table information is negligeble.  I can work around that.  What I can't work around are function name collisions, and certain variable name collisions.

You wouldn't be violating the license by using the integration as it is currently distributed.  The developer who is distributing it is violating the SMF license, which puts the future of that piece of software in a precarious position, so I would not suggest using it at this time.

[nightmarepatrol]

How about the theming issues? Is it even possible to get the two to use a combined stylesheet? Diddling with the css is't not diffucult,  My biggest problem is that I can at best tinker with php. perl i'm good with (yes, I'm a SA) 

I guess I better start learning if I want to do this though.

[Orstio]

There are no issues with theming.  You can make your SMF theme look however you want.

[nightmarepatrol]

I understand that, I've overhauled a few stylesheets,  but It would be possible to get SMF and drupal to use the SAME style sheet without too much screwing around?

[steighan]

I understand that, I've overhauled a few stylesheets,  but It would be possible to get SMF and drupal to use the SAME style sheet without too much screwing around?

yes.

make your CSS file a PHP file instead (.php) or put an "addtype" command in your .htaccess to have CSS files parse as php (or a redirect)

in any event, once you transform your static CSS files to dynamic intelligent php code, you can then put in logic to read the SMF CSS and output analagous CSS on the Drupal or Joomla or Mambo side.
remember to output the appropriate headers of course

Code Select Expand


<?php
//The headers below tell the browser to cache the file and also tell the browser it is css.
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate");
$offset = 60*60*24*60;
$ExpStr = "Expires: ".gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s",time() + $offset)." GMT";
header($ExpStr);
header('Content-Type: text/css');
?>