The Ongoing Saga of the phpBB3 Gamer Site - Christmas Day 2006 - a thriving gamer community with thousands of members was left out in the cold when the creators of their planet, a custom built php forums application, disappeared. It had disappeared before, but it always came back, eventually. We suspected at Thanksgiving that the next time it vanished, it could very well be forever.

I'll never forget how after being approached by a team member Christmas week, that perhaps I, Doc, should build a new forums site, for free of course. PlanetThinkTanks2.com was being built/dontated by me (doh) just as the original planet went missing. I used phpBB2.

The first six months on a crappy shared hosted server proved time consuming due to the site being compromised constantly. The site is heavily modified with arcades, galleries, events, etc. The dawn of phpBB3 proved to resolve most of this, but it is always a major concern when one modifies the core application code in order to be fruitful.

Skipping ahead to 2010 and Joomla!, as I work on projects for others, I keep little planetthinktanks2 in the back of mind, hoping that one day, before the community dies off completely from lack of exposure and user friendliness, that I will one day get the perfect marriage in Joomla! of a full featured forums suite combined with a full featured social networking suite, all integrated and playing nicely inside the Joomla! core application.

We need an events manager, a calendar, a gallery, a repository, a glossary, a help desk, custom groups, ACL, flash arcade, bonus forum odds and ends like banning, points, mass mail, the list is massive, but I don't think uncommon for those wishing to build a community of your choosing.

Six months ago we made a big push, a team was assembled to assist me and most of the core user data is actually sitting nice inside Joomla! This leaves the flash arcade and the actual forum board to deal with at this point, other then template issues, one would think it a breeze. I say eek! to that.

Rokbridge
Well....you pretty much need the rest of the application that you don't get when you get the FREE bridge to make it look right. Even with the free bridge there's no nice playing going on between the 2 templates. The server seemed to crawl supporting both applications at once inside an iframe. To menu link to it from Joomla! you need a matching template or construct one to match. Spent lots of time with it though, just didn't learn anything new except I'd need money to make it look right. Hopefully with that money would come lots of template support, and I hear they have a new release of the template "connector" for the new Gantry system.

Kunena
Met these folks at JDay Vegas 2009. Nice guys, enthusiastic about their code. I have tried to go with that flow and installed Kunena here at Joomla-Webmasters.com. It serves it's purpose if you don't need banning, or animated user gifs. Born out of the ashes of fireboard, if you work in Kunena be warned. I'd go as far as to say it's not ready for prime time.  Not from a mechanical forum in front of you point of view, it does that just fine. Behind the scenes you will find an integrated template structure. This means exactly that every upgrade of the project, you need a new template IN THAT VERSION. Who wants to go through a 4,000 line CSS file and about 50 .php and html files EVERYTIME the application is updated? Even the pro Kunena template clubs are 1-3 releases behind the current version. In a nutshell, you have new application and no templates. Yet...it's being rebuilt with this core "failure" in mind. I don't expect to see anyone hanging on to it until it's planned v2+ releases. It's still free, for now.

JomSocial
Isn't a forum board, it's a social networking suite of applications. To use it alone in most environments may create a disjointed user feeling, such as, "where's the beef?"

Community Builder
See JomSocial description above.

On to Plan B
My new approach is to install a clean phpBB3 in a folder inside Joomla! Utilize 2 separate databases and install jfusion. The biggest task here should be extracting and migrate only the data I need to come over, so I can close all the holes and vulnerabilities created by modifying the phpBB3 core in days gone by.

jfusion.org if you need a bridge, that isn't a bridge, inside Joomla. Available for many current internet applications.

I noticed, while cruising around in phpmysqmin, after importing a couple hundred RSS articles with FeedGator into Joomla! that a lot of the content item's metas and attribs were missing. I especially didn't like that being the administrator, my id was associated with all these articles which I'm not authoring. The site's socialization features attribute them to me. I created a user called "joomlabot" so that I could assign all these site mechanic tasks to it. (Now, if I could just remember to login as joomlabot before performing site maintenance! ;)

"The needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, or the one".

With over 3,000 article content items to juggle, I pondered the fastest way to update all these tables, and then go through the pain of updating those handful which are blog entries with other queries.

I used SQL query to fill in all the missing data for all the article content - in this case common among them all - are `created_by`, `attribs`, and `metadata`. I looked up the user ID of the joomlabot, wrote a set of pre-filled semi-empty attribs, and then set a 2 line metadata for author and follow.

Here's the code:

UPDATE `database_name`.`jos_content` SET `created_by` = 'Numeric ID of my bot', `attribs` = 'show_title=
link_titles=
show_intro=
show_section=
link_section=
show_category=
link_category=
show_vote=
show_author=
show_create_date=
show_modify_date=
show_pdf_icon=
show_print_icon=
show_email_icon=
language=en-GB
keyref=value
readmore=', `metadata` = 'robots=follow
author=joomlabot';

*read my comment below.

Getting SSL running in Joomla! 1.5.x Tribulations

...on XP and Vista.
"Heart attack!" is an understatement while at 5am as I was trying to beat the EST crowd and my dedicated server "seemingly" disappeared. I had been working for about 5 hours installing SSL, testing, and everything was great on Ubuntu. I FTP'd from a Vista x64 rig to the box and BAM...the whole server's HTTP was inaccessible, at least from every hard wired Windows rig on my home network.

This was the day I discovered exactly how valuable my Android G1 cell has become to my profession. I could go on and on about the things I tried. People I called. Research I bared. Once I found the culprut, I intended to prove it by retaking steps to make this bug rear it's ugly head.

If this happens to you, don't think cPanel has banned your ip. Don't fret, your router isn't tossing a fit on your windows machines. Don't dig in your SSL, though deleting old crts out of your browsers is probably a great idea.

It's harsh, but it had to be done. Yep, it's the Vista Firewall...go hit the big "RESET to Default" button to get back to work.

Great! So, now "we" have all the little pieces of SSL in place on the dedicated server, including a dedicated IP. I fired up Joomla! Admin, and bingo-rama what a sweet treat! It actually behaves rather nicely when the server is properly configured, according to my tricorder.;}.

If you're having problems getting HTTPS running in Joomla! 1.5.x, start with your SSL and make sure it's 100% on the server. My only gripe to date is when I use the link to "Preview" the site, it maintains the "https" in the new or tabbed windows...something I'll have to investigate.

Tips:.htaccess, purchased SSL cert, dedicated IP for your website, cache management, update all applications locally to the new dedicated IP, dump old browser certs.